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http://www.archive.org/details/dayswithwaltwhit00carp1

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V

ays with ~ ~
Walt Whitman

U^ith some J\(otes on his
Life and H^ork <* •** >*

*By Edward Carpenter

New York : The Macmillan Company
London : George Allen Mdccccvi

Printed by

Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.

Edinburgh

PREFACE

IV AY first acquaintance with Whitman's
writings (William Rossetti's edition
of the Poems) was made at Cambridge
during the Long Vacation in the summer
of 1868 — or it may have been '69. But
it was not till 1877 that I crossed the
Atlantic and paid my first visit to him.
In 1884 I was again in the States, and
saw Whitman several times. The notes
made on the occasions of these visits
were written out at a later period,
and finally published in the Progressive
Review (February and April 1897) in

Preface

the same form as they now stand.

The other papers in the present book

belong to a still later date, and, with

one exception, have not been published

before.

E. C.

April 1906.

VI

CONTENTS

Preface <?age v

A Visit to Walt Whitman in 1877 1

Walt Whitman in 1884 33
Notes and Appreciations —

Whitman as Prophet . . . .71
Appendix to Whitman as Pro-
phet ..... 94
The Poetic Form of " Leaves of

Grass" . . . 103

Walt Whitman's Children . 137

Whitman and Emerson . 153

Vll

PORTRAITS

Walt Whitman at the age of 35 Frontispiece

From a Daguerrotype taken in 1854
{Photogravure)

Walt Whitman at the age of 53 To face p. 71

From a Photograph taken in 1872
(Photogravure)

R. W. Emerson (at the age of 52) „ 153

From a Photograph taken in 1855
(Photogravure)

Vlll

A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN

IN 1877

A VISIT TO WALT WHITMAN
IN 1877

[T was on the 2nd of May 1877, that
* — crossing the water from Philadelphia
— I knocked at the door of 431 Stevens
Street, Camden. The house, a narrow
three-storied one, stood in one of those
broad tree-planted streets which are com-
mon in the States ; and Whitman was
staying there, boarding with his brother
Colonel George Whitman and wife —
making the establishment at any rate his
headquarters, though frequently absent
from it. I waited a few minutes in a sit-
ting-room of the usual type — one or two
ornamental tables, with photograph books,

3

Days with Walt Whitman

things under glass shades, &c. — while
" Walt " was called upstairs. He soon
came down, slowly, leaning heavily on
the banisters, always dragging somewhat
his paralysed leg — at first sight quite an
old man with long grey, almost white,
beard, and shaggy head and neck, grey
dress too ; but tall, erect, and at closer
sight not so old — a florid fresh com-
plexion, pure grey-blue eye (no sign of
age there), and full, strong, well-formed
hands.

At the foot of the staircase he took me
by the hand and said, "I was afraid we
should miss after all" — this in reference
to a previous unsuccessful call I had made.
There was no hurry in his manner ; having
found me a seat, and then only leaving
hold of my hand, he sat down himself and
asked me " what news I brought from
Britain." War had just been declared
between Russia and Turkey. Like other

4

Whitman in 1877

Americans, his sympathies lay with Russia.
His idea was that Russia stood in need of
a southern outlet (Constantinople) for her
people and growing energies, that Turkey
was falling in pieces, and that England
was beginning to pursue " the wise policy
of absolute non-intervention." Conver-
sation then turned on England. He asked
about friends there ; also about myself
some questions.

Meanwhile in that first ten minutes I
was becoming conscious of an impres-
sion which subsequently grew even more
marked — the impression, namely, of im-
mense vista or background in his person-
ality. If I had thought before (and I do
not know that I had) that Whitman was
eccentric, unbalanced, violent, my first
interview certainly produced quite a con-
trary effect. No one could be more
considerate, I may almost say courteous ;
no one could have more simplicity of

5

Days with Walt Whitman

manner and freedom from egotistic
wrigglings; and I never met any one who
gave me more the impression of knowing
what he was doing than he did. Yet away
and beyond all this I was aware of a
certain radiant power in him, a large
benign effluence and inclusiveness, as of
the sun, which filled out the place where
he was — yet with something of reserve
and sadness in it too, and a sense of re-
moteness and inaccessibility.

Some such impressions, at any rate, I
gathered in the first interview. I re-
member how I was most struck, in his
face, by the high arch of the eyebrows,
giving a touch of child-like wonder and
contemplation to his expression ; yet his
eyes, though full of a kind of wistful
tenderness, were essentially not contem-
plative but perceptive — active rather than
receptive — lying far back, steady, clear,
with small definite pupils and heavy lids of

6

Whitman in 1877

passion and experience. A face of majestic
simple proportion, like a Greek temple as
some one has said ; the nose Greek in
outline, straight (but not at all thin or
narrow, rather the contrary), broad be-
tween the brows, and meeting the line of
the forehead without any great change
of direction ; the forehead high, with
horizontal furrows, but not excessively
high ; the head domed, and rising to a
great height in the middle, above the ears
— not projecting behind ; ears large and
finely formed ; mouth full, but almost
quite concealed by hair. A head alto-
gether impressing one by its height, and
by a certain untamed " wild hawk " look,
not uncommon among the Americans.

After some conversation Whitman
proposed a walk across to Philadephia.
Putting on his grey slouch hat he
sallied forth with evident pleasure, and
taking my arm as a support walked slowly

7

Days with Walt Whitman

the best part of a mile to the ferry.
Crossing the ferry was always a great
pleasure to him. His " Brooklyn Ferry M
and the section entitled " Delaware River
— Days and Nights " in " Specimen Days,"
sufficiently prove this. The life of the
streets and of the people was so near, so
dear. The men on the ferry steamer
were evidently old friends ; and when we
landed on the Philadelphia side we were
before long quite besieged. The man or
woman selling fish at the corner of the
street, the tramway conductor, the loafers
on the pavement — a word of recognition
from Walt, or as often from the other
first. Presently a cheery shout from the
top of a dray ; and before we had gone
many yards farther the driver was down
and standing in front of us — his horses
given to the care of some bystander. He
was an old Broadway "stager," "had not
seen Walt for three or four years " ; and

Whitman in 1877

tears were in his eyes as he held his hand.
We were now brought to a standstill, and
others gathered round ; " George " was ill,
and Walt must go and see him. There
was a message for the children, and in his
pocket the poet discovered one or two
packets of sweetmeats for absent little
ones. But for the most part his words
were few. It was the others who spoke,
and apparently without reserve.

Thus we rambled through Philadel-
phia— mostly using the tramcars. The
Yankees do not walk ; the trams in their
large towns are very complete, and are
universally used for all but short distances.
Whitman could not walk far. I was
content being with him anyhow. He
certainly was restfulness itself. When we
reached the Ferry on our return, the last
bell was ringing — we might have caught
the boat, but Whitman seemed not to
think of hurrying. The boat went, and

9

Days with Walt Whitman

he sat down to enjoy life waiting for the
next.

A few days later, Walt having gone
into the country to stay with his " dear
and valued friends," the Staffords, I paid
him a visit there. " White Horse," or
Kirkwood, was the third or fourth
station from Camden on the Camden
and Atlantic line ; and consisted at that
time of only some half-dozen houses and
stores, forming a centre to the scattered
and outlying farmsteads of that part. The
Staffords' little farm lay a mile and a
half or so from the station — a five or
six-roomed wooden house, a barn, one or
two fruit trees, and a few fields running
down 300 or 400 yards to a little stream.
The country level, very slightly undulat-
ing, wooded here and there, not unlike
some parts of Cambridgeshire that I have
seen — neither particularly attractive or
unattractive. Here on this farm, and

10

Whitman in 1877

working it himself, lived Mr. Stafford
with his family ; he a loyal Methodist,
sometimes acting as local preacher, silent-
mannered, dark-skinned, of bilious tem-
perament, subject to illness, hard-working,
and faithful ; his wife a fine woman of
cultured expression and spiritual mind,
pretty well absorbed in domestic work ;
two sons, young fellows, one of whom,
Harry, at this time working in a printer's
office in Camden, was a great ally and
favourite of Walt's ; a grown-up daughter,
and one or two children. Here Whitman
would often stay, weeks or months at
a time, boarding and living with the
family, and attracting the members of
it to him, and himself to them, with
the ties of enduring friendship. Mrs.
Stafford once said to me : " He is a
good man ; I think he is the best man
I ever knew."

It was his delight, and doubtless one of

11

Days with Walt Whitman

the chief attractions of this favourite ' re-
sort, to go down and spend a large part
of the day by the " creek " which I have
spoken of — and which figures so largely
in " Specimen Days." At a point not a
quarter of a mile distant from the house
it widened into a kind of little lake sur-
rounded by trees, the haunt of innumer-
able birds ; and here Whitman would sit
for hours in an old chair ; silent, enjoying
the scene, becoming a part of it, almost,
himself; or would undress and bathe in
the still, deep pool. At this time he
was nearly sixty years old, and for some
eight years on and off had been stricken
with paralysis. As is well known, he attri-
buted his partial recovery very largely to
the beneficence of this creek, with its
water-baths and sun-baths and open-air
influences generally.

That day being Sunday I found the
family all at home, and Whitman in the

12

Whitman in 1877

midst of them. When the opportunity
occurred I told him something of the
appreciation of his writings that had
grown up in England during those years.
After a pause he asked if the Rossetti
edition was out of print. I said I thought
so. W. : " I hope it is ; I approved of
Rossetti's plan for the time being, but
now would rather appear without altera-
tion. " [I am here simply transcribing
my notes made a day or two after ; these
are not his exact words, but as good
as I could remember.] " I had hardly
realised that there was so much interest in
me in England. I confess I am surprised
that America, to whom I have especially
addressed myself, is so utterly silent.
Lowell, and indeed almost all the critics,
say that I am crude, inartistic — do you
think that ? v I said I had heard such
criticisms, but I did not myself think his
work crude and hasty ; on the contrary,

Days with Walt Whitman

much of it seemed to me to have been
written very deliberately and carefully ;
and as to the question of art, I thought
he had laid an altogether broader basis of
style (instancing some of his poems) —
a great foundation ; others would build
here and there upon it, but he had
struck the main lines. W. : " I did, in
fact, re-write and destroy much before I
published ; I cannot think that I have
altogether attained, but I have planted
the seed ; it is for others to continue the
work. My original idea was that if I
could bring men together by putting be-
fore them the heart of man, with all its
joys and sorrows and experiences and sur-
roundings, it would be a great thing ; up
to this time I have had America chiefly
in view, but this appreciation of me in
England makes me think I might per-
haps do the same for the old world also.
I have endeavoured from the first to get

14

Whitman in 1877

free as much as possible from all literary
attitudinising — to strip off integuments,
coverings, bridges — and to speak straight
from and to the heart." [In reference to
this, he said at another time that it had
been a " whim " of his when writing " to
discard all conventional poetic phrases,
and every touch of or reference to ancient
or mediaeval images, metaphors, subjects,
styles, &c, and to write de novo with
words and phrases appropriate to his
own days."]

When we went in to dinner Mr. Stafford
was already seated ; I think he was about
to say grace. Walt, with greater grace,
stood for a moment bending over him
from behind, and clasped Stafford's head
in his great hands ; then passed on in
silence. What a large sweet presence —
so benign, yet so determined ! The chil-
dren loved him, and the little boy would
lie coiled, lost, on his knees, half-asleep,

»5

Days with Walt Whitman

half-awake, Walt's hand covering and
compressing his entire face.

In Philadelphia, the day before, Whit-
man had introduced me to his English
friends, the Gilchrists. Mrs. Gilchrist,
widow of Alexander Gilchrist, the bio-
grapher of Blake, was a capable and large-
minded woman. A year earlier she, with
two daughters and a son, had come from
England for a two or three years' visit to
the States, and had settled in Philadelphia.
As is well known, she was the first of
Englishwomen to fully and publicly re-
cognise (as she did in some printed letters)
the splendid genius of the poet, and that
at a time (1868 or '69) when "Leaves of
Grass " to most of the literary world was
little better than the incoherent ramblings
of a maniac. More than once did she
relate to me how, on first opening the
volume, when her eye fell upon the fine

nearly full-length engraving (taken from

16

Whitman in 1877

a daguerrotype) of the author, she ex-
claimed : " Here at last is the face of
Christ, which the painters have so long
sought for"; and she always maintained
that the reading of the book itself did
but confirm and deepen that first impres-
sion.

At the Gilchrists' house Whitman would
not unfrequently stay. Indeed there was
a kind of prophet's chamber for him
there, always ready. And as it happened
that he was about to pay a visit there, it
was arranged that I also should come.
They lived at No. 1929, North 22nd
Street. If the American method of
numbering streets and houses is prosaic,
it certainly has the advantage of being
practical. Philadelphia is like a chess-
board ; you find your way by co-ordinate
geometry. The streets are straight,
parallel, and not far from infinite in
length. The address being put in your

17 B

Days with Walt Whitman

hands, you know at once the exact spot
to which you are destined.

I remember very well arriving, bag
in hand, and finding the whole family
(a general custom in Philadelphia on those
warm evenings) sitting out on the door-
steps— Whitman in the midst, in an arm-
chair, his white beard and hair glistening
in the young moonlight, looking like
some old god — the others grouped around
him or at his feet. After this for a week
of evenings I made one of the party.
How pleasant it was ! Whitman had
a knack of making ordinary life enjoy-
able, redeeming it from commonplaceness.
Instead of making you feel (as so many
do) that the Present is a kind of squalid
necessity to be got over as best may be,
in view of something always in the future,
he gave you that good sense of nowness,
that faith that the present is enjoyable,
which imparts colour and life to the

18

Whitman in 1877

thousand and one dry details of existence.
As I have hinted before, he was no great
talker, and would generally let the con-
versation ebb and flow at its own will,
without effort, ready apparently for grave
or gay alike.

Unlike many highly important people
who seem to enjoy holding forth to a
general audience, Whitman, as I thought,
preferred to let conversation turn on the
pivot of personal relationship. Often as
not he would have his listener by the
hand ; and his words too had an attractive
force, from their very simplicity and
purity from affectation or display. I think
he did not really care to have conversa-
tional dealings with people except on such
a basis of personal affection. To such
as he did not like — to all mere gab-
blers, bores, spying and prying persons
— he became as a precipice, instantly and
utterly inaccessible. Certainly it was one

J9

Days with Walt Whitman

of the pleasures of his society that you
always felt he was there in person, bond
fide, not by deputy ; and no current notion
of politeness could make him do a thing
he did not enjoy doing. One evening we
were looking over some fine engravings,
mostly portraits, Gainsboroughs, Reynolds,
Lelys, and others, from Mrs. Gilchrist's
collection. He enjoyed them greatly,
and very deliberately, dwelling long and
long over some of them, criticising style,
workmanship, composition, character, &c.
But when he had had enough of it all —
well, he said so ! I have seldom known
any one who, though so cordial and near
to others, detached and withdrew himself
at times more decisively than he did, or
who on the whole spent more time in
solitude. Also no rough draft of his
character would be complete which did
not take into account the strong Quaker
element of obstinacy which existed in

20

Whitman in 1877

him — but this might require a separate
chapter !

To return to our evenings. I have said
something about Walt Whitman's manner
in conversation ; I cannot attempt to
reproduce its effect, but I will just
transcribe such notes of some of his
remarks as I have by me.

One evening conversation turned upon
the Chinese. W. : " I fancy they are like
the Germans, only more refined. My
notion is that the Germans are simple,
true, affectionate folk, but there is a kind
of roughness, one may almost say brutish-
ness, about them ; the Chinese have the
same good qualities, with a certain alert-
ness and grace which the Germans lack."
I quoted some accounts of Japan by a man
who had lived there for a long time, and
who told me that the manners of the old
Japanese aristocracy were so elaborately
perfect that he himself would go any

21

Days with Walt Whitman

distance to get out of their way, feeling
such a boor compared with them ! This
amused Whitman ; seemed to " tally
with his own idea." Mrs. Gilchrist
wondered, with regard to the natives
of India and Orientals generally, that
the degradation of the women did not
bring about a gradual deterioration of
the whole race. W. : " I suppose that
among the masses of the people the
women (and men too) live, after all,
much as they do in the West, and
as they must do in all times and
climes ; and that the special treatment
of women in the East only applies to
the upper classes. The masses in every
part of the globe are dominated by the
necessities of Nature. Thus also among
the Greeks and Romans the peasant-life
must have had its races of fine women."
And here he cited Juvenal, and his
comparison of the effeminate lady of

22

Whitman in 1877

his time with the " stern magnificent
mothers" of the early days of Rome.

Going on to Oriental literature, Whit-
man spoke of " Sakuntala," the Indian
drama, its " modernness " — the comic
scenes especially being as of the times of
Shakespeare ; and of the great Hindu epic,
the " Ramayana " ; and told the story of
Yudisthura, which occurs as an episode
in the latter. Conversation got round
presently — I think in reference to the
cramped life of " high-born" women in
the East — to the shoddiness and vulgarity
of modern well-to-do life. W. : " It
seems a strange thing to me, this love
of gilt and upholstery among the Ameri-
cans— that people leading a free natural
open-air life should, directly they make
a little money, want to go in for sofas,
expensively furnished rooms, dress, and
the like ; yet it seems to be a law, a
kind of necessity, that they should do so.

*3

Days with Walt Whitman

I suppose it is partly that each man
wishes to feel himself as good as others,
to feel that he can have of the ' best ' too ;
democracy showing itself for a time in
that way, reducing the borrowed old-world
standard of superiority to an absurdity ;
and I guess it will not last for ever."

We did not generally sit up later than
eleven. Breakfast was at 7.30 or 8.
Walt's arrival in the morning was as ex-
hilarating as a fine sunrise. After break-
fast and a chat we would separate to our
respective occupations. In the afternoon,
almost every day I was there, the poet
went off to Camden to visit his sister-in-
law, who was at that time confined to the
house, and to whom, I believe, he was
much attached. As I have said, Walt was
very simple and domestic in his ways ;
and would quite enjoy, on a rainy after-
noon, having a game of twenty questions
such as he had " often played in camp with

X4

Whitman in 1877

the soldiers during the war," or would take
pleasure in preparing some little dish of
his own devising for the evening meal.
One evening we pressed him to read.
He would not recite anything of his own ;
but he read out Tennyson's " Ulysses " —
in a clear, strong, and rugged tone. The
subtle harmonies of the Tennysonian verse
effloresced under the treatment, but the
sterner qualities of the poem stood out
finely. We expressed admiration. He
said : " I guess it is about the best Tenny-
sonian poem." Another evening, I re-
member, he told us how, when living at
New York, he had had a " fancy" to visit
Sing-sing prison, the great penal establish-
ment up the Hudson river. He obtained
permission to do so, got to know one or
two of the warders, and for some time
went there pretty frequently. He wrote
letters for the prisoners, &c. " It was a
whim."

25

Days with Walt Whitman

We had a long talk on manual labour.
Most of us agreed it would be a good
thing for all classes to take part in — not
to be left to one class only. Walt main-
tained with regard to reforms and the
like, that it was no good trying to benefit
people (labouring people for instance)
who did not feel the need of any change.
" Many people came to me at one time
about slavery, and ' wondered ' that I
was so quiet about it ; but, in truth,
I felt that abolitionists were making
quite noise enough, and that there were
other things just as important which
had to be attended to." We got talk-
ing of Abraham Lincoln — I suppose in
reference to slavery — and I mentioned
the story that Lincoln went out of his
mind and nearly committed suicide over
a love affair. Walt, who always was a
great admirer of Lincoln, and who knew
a good deal about him and his history,

i6

Whitman in 1877

gave this a most emphatic denial, saying
that Lincoln was " never even near being
crazy."

One of the most amusing incidents of
my stay occurred one morning shortly
after breakfast, when a visiting card was
handed in bearing the ominous inscription
" Madame Dorbiney D'Aubigne," and was
quickly followed by the appearance of an
elderly ami loquacious little lady. She
was one of those detached women with a
reticule who travel about the world in
quest of anything " interesting." She had
been, she told us, all over the States and
seen many celebrities, but could not return
to Europe without visiting Whitman —
and it was only by a piece of luck that
she had found out where he was stay-
ing. However, it soon began to appear
that her interest in Walt was not so
great, naturally, as in herself; for after a
few preliminary compliments she settled

*7

Days with Walt Whitman

down to tell us all about the wonderful
D'Aubigne family to which she belonged.
It ramified all over the civilised world,
she said ; and the name was spelt in
ever so many different ways, but they
were all branches of the same family,
they were all related to each other —
as her own name indeed showed. Walt
listened in an amused manner, and for
about ten minutes was quite decently
courteous and patient. Then I suddenly
perceived that his face was becoming
' precipitous ' ; the little woman of
course was addressing him, no one else
being of any importance ; but he seemed
to be becoming deaf, there was no
speculation in his eyes ; it was rather
awful ; for a minute or two she tried
vainly to effect a lodgment for her
words, to get any kind of handhold on
the sheer surface, and then gathering
up her tackle, she made the best of

28

Whitman in 1877

a bad job, bade a hasty good-bye, and
disappeared.

I told Walt about a visit I paid to Oliver
Wendell Holmes, and the criticisms of
" Leaves of Grass " which I heard on that
occasion. I saw the " Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table " at his house in Boston.
He was then about 70 years of age — a
dapper active little man, full of life and
go, rather enjoying the visits of strangers
— " Oh yes, I have a large ' parish ' —
people write to me and come and call from
all parts of the world — we authors are
rather vain, you know, and quite enjoy a
little homage ; but my parish is not as big as
Longfellow's — not as big as Longfellow's.
But this is not a good time for you to see
Boston. Boston is very empty now —
(getting up and glancing through the
window) very empty ; you might almost
see a fox run down the street ; &c,

&c." I said something about American

29

Days with Walt Whitman

literature and " Leaves of Grass." " Oh !
Whitman,' ' he said, "well — well — well
— Whitman is all very well — he has
capacity, but it won't do — it won't do.
I tell you what, it's something like this :
you know, skilful cooks say that the
faintest odour, the merest whirl, of assa-
fcetida^ will give a piquant flavour to a
dish — and I can believe that ; but to drench
it in assafcetida, no, that won't do. The
poets coquette with Nature and weave
garlands of roses for her ; but Whitman
goes at her like a great hirsute man — no,
it won't do. Now," he continued, " the
other day Lowell and Longfellow and I
were chatting together, and the subject
of Whitman turned up. Said Lowell,
' I can't think why there is all this
stir about Whitman ; I have read a good
deal of his poetry, but I can't see any-
thing in it — I cant see anything in it.J

c Well,' said Longfellow, * I believe the

30

Whitman in 1877

man might have done something if he
had only had a decent training and edu-
cation.' As to my own opinion, why,"
said Holmes, "I have already given you
that. So you see what we think of him
in America." Whitman was a good deal
amused, and took it all in good part,
saying he knew pretty well already what
they thought.

As the days went by I began to see
more clearly the depths which lay behind
the poet's simple and unconcerned ex-
terior. Literary persons, as a rule, write
over their own heads ; they talk a little
bigger than themselves. But Whitman
seemed to fill out " Leaves of Grass," and
form an interpretation of it. I began to
see that all he had written there was
matter of absolute personal experience —
that you might be sure that what was said
was meant. There was the same de-
liberate suggestiveness about his actions

31

Days with Walt Whitman

and manners that you find in his writings
— only, of course, with the added force of
bodily presence ; and far down too there
were clearly enough visible the same
strong and contrary moods, the same
strange omnivorous egotism, controlled
and restrained by that wonderful genius
of his for human affection and love.
" Who has the most enamoured body ? "
were words which somehow his presence
often suggested. It was with real re-
luctance that, a week after my arrival, I
bade adieu to all that friendly household ;
and the next morning but one, from
the stern of the Siberia, watched the
flat shores of New England, and the
lighthouse that marks the entrance to
Boston Harbour, recede and dip below
the broadening waters of the Atlantic.

3*

WALT WHITMAN IN 1884

WALT WHITMAN IN 1884

'"THE next time I saw Walt Whitman
was the 17th June 1884. He had
then left Stevens Street, owing to the re-
moval of his brother, but was still living
in Camden, in a small house which he
had himself part-purchased — 328 Mickle
Street. He had at that time, for house-
keepers, an elderly workman and his wife,
Mr. and Mrs. Lay, with whom he was on
easy terms, and with whom he had his
meals. In appearance I thought him much
the same as in 1877— a trifle thinner per-
haps, and certainly more infirm. Some
expression of weariness too I thought I saw,
which would likely arise from the increased

$5

Days with Walt Whitman

confinement of his life. " I keep going,"
he said, "much the same. Visits from
English friends are perhaps my chief diver-
sion." Then, after tender inquiries, espe-
cially for Mrs. Gilchrist (who was now in
London), " have just had a visit from
Oscar Wilde — who told me about Eng-
land ; I made him do the talking — rather
liked him. I have occasional letters from
Dowden — a steady friend — and others.
Bucke's book1 is going off slowly— not
much cared for by my friends — but I
like it. I opposed the book all along,
till Bucke, getting fairly out of patience,
came one day and said, ' Now I am just
as obstinate as you, and I intend to
bring it out whether you like it or no —
so you had better make the best of the
matter and help to make it authentic as
far as you can ' ; whereupon I caved in,

i "Walt Whitman," by R. Maurice Bucke, M.D.
Philadelphia, 1883.

36

Whitman in 1884

laughing heartily, and wrote the account
of my birthplace and antecedents which
occupies the first twenty-four pages of
the book."

" I thought that there was a germinal
idea in Bucke's book — the idea that
' Leaves of Grass ' was above all an ex-
pression of the Moral Nature. As to
O'Connor's letters — I must say I like
them. They are comforting. Just as
any woman likes a man to fall in love
with her — whether she returns it or not
— so to have once aroused so eloquent
and passionate a declaration is reassuring
and a help to me." We then spoke of the
money-making and gentility business at
New York — I remarking that I thought
it had all increased considerably since I
was there in '77, and he corroborating,
though holding that it probably had to
be gone through " for reasons."

Here I find the following passage

37

Days with Walt Whitman

among my notes : " I am impressed
more than ever with W.'s contradictory,
self-willed, tenacious, obstinate character,
strong and even extreme moods, united
with infinite tenderness, wistful love, and
studied tolerance ; also great caution [he
says : ' the phrenologists always say that
caution is my chief characteristic — did
you know that ? * and a certain artful-
ness, combined with keen, penetrating and
determined candour ; the wild-hawk look
still there, ' untamable, untranslatable/ yet
with that wonderful tenderness at bottom."
The next day Walt came over, at
noon, to CrowelFs hotel, where I was stay-
ing ; we dined and went to Fairmount
Park in the afternoon. Talked a little
about social questions. W. : " I believe,
like Carlyle, in men ; I think that not-
withstanding all set-offs the great capi-
talists and masters of private enterprise
have, in America at least, been useful.

38

Whitman in 1884

I have myself had all along a tender feel-
ing for Co-operation, but for that doubt
whether a committee or an elected person
could or would do the work." As to
England, he seemed to think that emi-
gration would relieve it, and he looked
upon the law and custom of entail as
the " hard-pan underlying your social
institutions." " I like and welcome all
agitation, even the fiercest, but like
Carlyle have little belief in reform talk.
Society, like a person in middle life, is set,
and you have to make the best of it. I
am, I hope, a bit of a reformer myself.
Yes, we must grow generous, ungrasping
masters of industry ; absurd as the idea
would seem to most now-a-days, I believe
that is the upshot of what is going on.
The creation of a large, independent,
democratic class of small owners is the
main thing — though it is never once men-
tioned by our economists and politicians.

39

Days with Walt Whitman

I am satisfied that for America Free Trade
and open admission of all foreigners is an
integral part of its theory ; the future of
the world is one of open communication
and solidarity of all races ; and if that
problem cannot be solved in America it
cannot be solved anywhere."

We drove to Fairmount Park in a 'bus,
walked a little, sat at the refreshment
tables, and listened to the band — Walt
absorbed and quiet for the most part,
recognised by a few among the well-dressed
crowd, but seeming to hold himself aloof
with almost an air of hauteur — looking
fine withal in his grey suit and with
grey uncovered head, tho' perhaps a little
weary. He asked me somewhat about
my life and doings at home.

The following evening I stayed to

supper with Whitman in the little kitchen

of his home, in company with Mr. and

Mrs. Lay. They seemed homely decent

4o

Whitman in 1884

people, rather dull and quiet. Walt, who
was dressed just in shirt and trousers — for
the weather was hot — kept things going.
Afterwards we sat in the front room with
Folger McKinsey, a young Philadelphian
of literary leanings, who had come in.
Walt talked about Shakespeare, the Bacon
theory, the greatness of the historical plays,
the " dragon-rancours " of the barons, King
Lear, &c. " I will not be positive about
Bacon's connection with the plays, but I
am satisfied that behind the historical
Shakespeare there is another mind, guid-
ing, and far, far reaching, giving weight
and permanent value to what would other-
wise have been only two plays a year
written for a witty, alert, jocose audience
— chiefly of young gallants."

The conversation turned somehow on
death. W. : " It is in reality a very dif-
ferent affair from the romantic stage view
of it ; deathbed speeches and ' scenes ' are

41

Days with Walt Whitman

of the rarest occurrence. I have witnessed
hundreds of deaths, and as a rule it seems
just a matter of course — like having your
breakfast, or any other event of the day,
and met with indifference at the last,
and with apathy, or unconsciousness."

After an hour or two we went out and
walked a little through the Camden streets
— Walt, as usual, with plentiful greetings
to passers-by. He would insist on our
coming into a shop and having some re-
freshment, and then a few minutes later at
the corner of a street, left us, I remember,
with that queer brusque manner of his
which so often offended his friends — just
coldly saying "Ta-ta," and going off as if
he didn't care if he never saw us again !

The next morning (June 30) was my
last visit to Whitman ; we had a long
and intimate conversation. He was very
friendly and affectionate, and sat by the

open window downstairs enjoying the wafts

42

Whitman in 1884

of fragrant air, while he talked about
" Leaves of Grass." " What lies behind
1 Leaves of Grass ' is something that few,
very few, only one here and there, perhaps
oftenest women, are at all in a position to
seize. It lies behind almost every line ;
but concealed, studiedly concealed ; some
passages left purposely obscure. There is
something in my nature furtive like an old
hen ! You see a hen wandering up and
down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite
unconcerned, but presently she finds a
concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg,
and comes away as though nothing had
happened ! That is how I felt in writing
1 Leaves of Grass.' Sloane Kennedy calls
me ■ artful ' — which about hits the mark.
I think there are truths which it is neces-
sary to envelop or wrap up." I replied
that all through history the old mysteries,
or whatever they may have been called, had
been held back ; and added that probably

43

Days with Walt Whitman

we had something yet to learn from India
in these matters. W. : " I do not myself
think there is anything more to come
from that source ; we must rather look to
modern science to open the way. Time
alone can absolutely test my poems or any
one's. Personally, I think that the ' some-
thing ' is more present in some of my small
later poems than in the ' Song of Myself.' "
This was the last I saw of Whitman.
I left him sitting there by the window
in his downstairs room, close to the street
and the passers-by — his clear eye un-
dimmed by age, his rugged, loving nature
unaltered ; though there was a certain
grave weariness in his otherwise majestic
presence, which gives one a touch of
sadness when one thinks that he had still
nearly eight years to pass of increasing
physical disablement and of continually
diminishing vitality, culminating at last in
serious bodily misery and wretchedness,

44

Whitman in 1884

before death might relieve him of the
burden of the flesh.

It seems strange at first that Whitman's
death should have been of such a lingering
character — three months, from Christmas
1 891, to near the end of the following
March, in a dying state nearly all the
time, with much restlessness, sleeplessness,
misery, and even pain at times. But in
some ways this was in consonance with his
physical temperament — his extraordinarily
voluminous hold on life, all phases of it,
his extreme tenacity, his strong implication
in the life of the body and the senses, his
affectionate and unceasing love towards
his friends, and his marked and obdurate
egoism — all things which held him to life,
and needed a long process of disentangle-
ment, fibre by fibre as it were, before he
could be released.

Volume — voluminousness — was one of
Walt's most notable features. Physically

45

Days with Walt Whitman

it was so — as witness his ample propor-
tions, his keen and well-furnished senses ;
mentally the same — a mind well stocked,
interested in every subject, balancing,
weighing, comparing, slow-moving, but
never retracing its steps ; emotionally and
by temperament the same, with an im-
mense range of emotion, and volume of
feeling when roused, but slow, deliberate,
cautious, lethargic, and at times even lump-
ishly immovable. This voluminousness
is the key to his literary style, which at its
best is magnificent — thought after thought
culled from every side and department of
life, ranged in successive line and phrase,
marshalled and held in suspense as it were
in huge array, till at last they are hurled
upon the reader in one mass and with
overwhelming power ; but which style at
its worst is cumbersome and disjointed.
It is this voluminousness which goes with

the whole florid full emotional nature of

46

Whitman in 1884

the man, fond of materials and plenty of
materials, not especially careful of order
or arrangement, not too studiedly clear
or concise in thought and expression, but
always ample and inclusive.

Another main point in Whitman's char-
acter is, I think, best expressed by the
word " cussedness." I have touched on
it once or twice : the contrary moods,
the spirit of refusal, the wilfulness, which
by their at times necessary opposition
and antagonism to his ample and loving
humanity formed, I believe, a great
tragic element in his nature — and possibly
prevented him ever being quite what is
called " happy in love affairs. " He cele-
brates in his poems the fluid, all-solvent
disposition, but often was himself less the
river than the rock. In these moods,
fixed, silent, and unquestionable, he was
a thing you might try your strength upon,
but which you were not likely to move !

47

Days with Walt Whitman

In the slow downward slope of his head

from back to front, and in the lines of

his eye and brow, tenacity was written ;

it looked out upon you from the small,

well-defined pupil set under its long,

curtain-like lid ; and there was at times

in his face, as I have said, the look as of

a precipice, sheer, with breakneck ledges.

One can imagine how this portion of his

character, at any rate in his younger days,

must have conflicted with his equally

innate and imperious craving for human

love and fellowship, and what suffering

the conflict must have brought to him at

times. R. W. Emerson said to me once

(1877) of Whitman that when he came

to know him he found him "a wayward,

fanciful man." * This was not probably

meant to be a complete account of the

man, yet it indicates Emerson's perception

of certain characteristics in him. In later

1 See infra, p. 166.
48

Whitman in 1884

years the large, equable human heart
asserted itself more and more, and nothing
could be more beautiful than the tolerance
towards old and young of all sorts which
he exhibited ; while the waywardness be-
came refined into something majestic. I
remember old Mr. Pearsall Smith, of
Philadelphia, who knew Whitman very
well, saying that one of the things which
impressed him most about Walt was his
" magnificent No ! " — how sometimes when
invited out, or asked to do anything which
he did not care to do, there would roll
forth — unqualified by any thanks, or ex-
planation, or excuse — the simple negative,
with a great round O, and yet, as a rule,
with a large sunny amiability which made
offence impossible.

I have two portraits — photographs —
which I am fond of comparing with each
other. One is of Whitman, taken in
1890 ; the other, taken at about the same

49 D

Days with Walt Whitman

time and at the same age (seventy years),
is of an Indian Gnani or seer. Both are
faces of the highest interest and import ;
but how different ! That of Whitman
deeply lined, bearing the marks of life-
long passion and emotion, aggressive and
determined, yet wistful and tender, full
of suffering and full of love, indicating
serenity, yet markedly turbid and clouded,
ample in brow and frame and flowing hair,
as of one touching and mingling with
humanity at all points — withal of a
wonderful majesty and grandeur, as of
the great rocks (to return always to that
simile) whose summits pierce at last the
highest domain.

The other portrait, of a man equally
aged, shows scarcely a line on the face ;
you might think for that and for the
lithe, active form that he was not more
than forty years old ; a brow absolutely

calm and unruffled, gracious, expressive

5°

Whitman in 1884

lips, well-formed features, and eyes — the
dominant characteristic of his countenance
— dark and intense, and illuminated by
the vision of the seer. In this face you
discern command, control, gentleness, and
the most absolute inward unity, serenity,
and peace ; no wandering emotions or
passions flit across the crystal mirror of
the soul ; self-hood in any but the highest
sense has vanished — the self has, as it
were, returned to its birthplace — leaving
behind the most childlike, single-hearted,
uncensorious, fearless character imaginable.
Yet just here one seems to miss some-
thing in the last character — the touch of
human and earthly entanglement. Here
is not exactly the great loving heart which
goes a few steps on the way with every
child of man ; here is not the ample-
domed brow which tackles each new
problem of life and science. Notwith-
standing evident signs of culture and

5*

Days with Walt Whitman

experience in the past, notwithstanding
vast power of concentration in any given
matter or affair when necessary, the face
shows that heart and intellect have be-
come quiescent, that interest in the actual
has passed or is passing away.

Whitman's immense moody and emo-
tional temperament — he calls it " tur-
bulent " himself — forms a factor of his
character and writings, which has perhaps
not been sufficiently considered — especially
by some of his admirers, who, as so often
happens, are more concerned to present
an ideal personality than a real portrait.
There are indeed some of his biographers
who are at pains to explain that many of
his expressions of sympathy and participa-
tion in the weaknesses and sins of humanity
are to be taken as theoretical or allegorical
expressions, having by no means a personal
interpretation. Yet surely this is to take
the clay out of the brick, the marble out

5*

Whitman in 1884

of the statue. While it is obvious that
no man could have in one lifetime run
through all the experiences mentioned in
" Leaves of Grass," the whole point of the
matter is that the author actually finds in
himself the capability of these experiences,
and quite personally identifies himself with
them. It is, in fact, just these earth-
entanglements, in a character so cosmic in
its range as his, which are of special im-
port as giving direction and effect to his
individuality and to his work. Not only
is it clear that without his voluminous
enfoldment in the earth-life — the Nessus-
shirt of Hercules — he could not well have
performed the mighty works that he did ;
but it is difficult to see how, without some
of that obduracy and egotism of his, he
could have held his own against the
great surge of obloquy and ridicule which
covered his first appearance on the field
of literature. Whitman saw (somewhere

53

Days with Walt Whitman

within himself) the typical man of a new
era ; and he gave himself to the utterance
of what he saw. It stood in the most
glaring and irremediable contrast to the
genteel ideal of the civilisation around
him. Alone, he had to confront the
whole of modern society. Now then, if
ever, strength was needed. Now then
tenacity, obstinacy, wilfulness ; they had to
be made the most of. If they were faults
they were such as could ill be spared,
His was perhaps the most deliberately
daring advance ever made in literature ;
and it is difficult to believe that it could
have been made except by one in whom
the rocky elements of character were
abundantly present. " Leaves of Grass "
itself has this quality of undeniable
u thereness " ; and when the critics have
had their say and expended all their shafts
upon it, it still remains solid and un-
touched— like the earth, which survives

54

Whitman in 1884

all the theories of the geologists and sur-
renders itself to none.

There is a third point. In many ways
Whitman marks a stage of human evolu-
tion not yet reached, and hardly suspected,
by humanity at large ; but in no respect is
this more true than in respect of his
capacity of Love. If you consider Whit-
man's life you will see that Love ruled it,
that he gave his life for love. There
were other motives no doubt, but this one
ultimately dominated them all. It per-
meates like a flame his entire writings ; it
took him to the battlefield and the hospi-
tals in succour of the wounded soldiers ;
it led him (before the war) deep into the
life and comradeship of the people — all
phases ; after the war it united him in
bonds of tender and life-long friendship
with many,1 both men and women ; it

1 See his Letters to Pete Doyle, published under the
title " Calamus," by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston,
U.S.A.

55

Days with Walt Whitman

surrounded his death-bed with devotion,
and brought thousands to his funeral.
For it he gave away his possessions and
the material means of life, he gave his
prospects of professional success, he gave
health, fame — all that a man can give —
and accepted illness and obscurity, and
oftentimes long and painful loneliness
and betrayal even of love itself.1

He was a man in whom the power of

1 See that remarkable poem printed in the i860
edition of " Leaves of Grass" (p. 355), but afterwards
omitted, perhaps as being too personal : —

" Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,
Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome

and unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning

my face in my hands ;
Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go

forth, speeding swiftly the country roads, or

through the city streets, or pacing miles and

miles, stifling plaintive cries ;
Hours discouraged, distracted — for the one I

cannot content myself without, soon I saw

him content himself without me ;
Hours when I am forgotten, (O weeks and months are

passing, but I believe I am never to forget !)
56

Whitman in 1884

love was developed to an extraordinary
degree. Yet (thanks to him) this was
no attenuated or merely spiritual love,
but was a large and generous passion,
spiritual and emotional of course, but
well rooted in the physical and sexual
also. In him the various sides and mani-
festations of the passion were so blent,
that instead of weakening they recognised
and reinforced each other ; and, coming

Sullen and suffering hours ! (I am ashamed — but

it is useless — I am what I am ;)
Hours of my torment — I wonder if other men ever

have the like, out of the like feelings ?
Is there even one like me — distracted — his friend,

his lover, lost to him ?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the

morning, dejected, thinking who is lost to

him ? and at night, awaking, think who is lost ?
Does he too harbor his friendship silent and

endless ? harbor his anguish and passion ?
Does some stray reminder, or the casual mention

of a name, bring the fit back upon him,

taciturn and deprest ?
Does he see himself reflected in me? In these

hours does he see the face of his hours

reflected?"

57

Days with Walt Whitman

into touch with humanity, as he did with
a kind of careless equalness from all
these sides ; piercing through the layers
and folds of caste, through differences
of race, climate, character, occupation ;
despising distances of space and time ;
he drew men and women of the most
varied nature and habits to himself,
saved them from their own little selves —
from their own little virtues and vices
— and united them in the solidarity of
humanity, by their common attachment
to him. " Leaves of Grass " is the meet-
ing-ground of the human race. There
every nationality, every creed, every
trade, every atom of humanity is repre-
sented, and all are fused in the great
loving soul that overbroods them.

If it seems difficult to reconcile this
great and abounding charity of Whitman
with his strong egotism, it is perhaps

not needful to reconcile them. They

58

Whitman in 1884

may have been two necessarily opposite
poles of his nature. At any rate to assert
this love — physical, sexual, emotional,
spiritual — extending to all races, castes,
to the most despised and degraded, to the
near home and far off, to the virtuous
and to the criminal, to men as well as to
women, to the animals even — in all its
phases and utterances ; and to assert this
egoism, plainly, unblushingly, in all its
forms — confidence, pride, self-esteem,
desire, and delight in all the natural
powers and appetites — Whitman de-
liberately set himself. In doing so he
(necessarily) upset all former and formal
moralities, and exposed himself to the
fiercest opposition ; but some day — when
it has come to be recognised that the
medium in which the true ego, the soul,
lives and moves is neither gain nor
fame, nor duty nor denial, but indeed
love and love alone — it will be seen that

59

Days with Walt Whitman

" Leaves of Grass " is, perhaps of all
books ever written, the most natural and
nobly inevitable.

A fourth point which I will venture
to touch on in this estimate of Whitman
— perhaps the most vital of all, but
impossible to be adequately seized or
expressed — is what may be called his
'illumination.' "Leaves of Grass," of
course, would not have been written
without it ; it runs behind every page —
" the vision and the faculty divine." This
perception in the universal, this power of
seeing things apart from the mundane
self, and independent of their relation to
that self, appears to be a kind of trans-
cendent faculty in man ; which occasion-
ally manifests itself, and which brings him
— it may perhaps be said — into relation
with another order of existence. Indeed
the strangeness of the sensation, and

the intoxication of this vision, appears

60

Whitman in 1884

sometimes to be so great that — as in the
case of the blinding glare at the mouth
of Plato's cavern ("Republic," bk. vii.)
—the beholder after witnessing it is un-
hinged for ordinary life, and can neither
see the things of the world in their
accustomed light, nor describe clearly
what else it is that he has seen. This
it is, no doubt, that constitutes the partial
' mania ' of the poet (Plato's " Phasdrus"),
and which accounts also for the fact that
many people of mystical tendency, after a
momentary illumination of the kind, re-
lapse into a sort of drivel for the rest of
their natural lives — circling always round
something which they have neither clearly
apprehended nor can conclusively forget
— but out of the memory of which they
hatch systems and 'revelations' and
dogmas without end. And indeed, if
we suppose, with Dr. Bucke, that the

faculty is one that is gradually evolving

61

Days with Walt Whitman

in human nature, there can be nothing
more likely than that its first exercise
should be accompanied by much doubt
and illusion and disturbance of the
intelligence generally, and even of the
moral nature.

In the case of Whitman, however, the
immense sanity of his intelligence and
his immense grasp of the actual world
prevented any serious dislocation of the
kind ; and, though the mania and intoxi-
cation are at times almost terrific (as in
the ' Song of Myself), he never loses his
hold on actual facts, but manages at last
to draw them in a great web over himself,
and to show the whole world transparent
with the illumination within.

This faculty of perception in the uni-
versal must not be looked upon as a mere
intellectual discrimination of certain facts
or objects ; it is rather, I take it, a con-
scious identity with the object ("I am the

62

Whitman in 1884

mash'd fireman with breastbone broken");
in which consciousness the emotional and
sensational elements are fused with the
intellectual, just as they are in the con-
sciousness of one's own existence and
actions. It is a universal light which
falls as it were on the interior side of all
objects, enabling the person that moves
along it to penetrate to their very essence
and to perceive their abiding relation to
each other. And the faculty begins to
develop itself normally in those (as one
would expect) whose emotional and in-
tellectual nature is becoming universal.
When sympathy and intelligence on the
ordinary plane have grown so far as to
bring the man into free and unprejudiced
relation with almost every phase of exist-
ence, then this new perception dawns
upon him ; the scales fall from the eyes
which have always before seen by the
light of self, and he sees by the light

63

Days with Walt Whitman

" which never was on sea or land."
" Willst du ins Unendliche schreiten,
geh' nur im Endlichen nach alien Seiten,"
says Goethe ; not that the mere travelling
through the finite of itself brings one to
the ' infinite,' but that it prepares the
human being as it were for his transla-
tion into it, when the time comes.

With Whitman it would seem that he
had travelled along the finite in pretty
well every direction, when, about the age
of thirty-five or thirty-six, or near that
time, this new order of consciousness,
and of being, opened out upon him. In-
stead of upsetting his broadly-based volu-
minous nature, it immediately established
that nature, forming the nucleus to its
endless ramifications, and the key and
reconcilement of its contrary moods.
His luxuriant turbulent emotional pas-
sional self acknowledged instantly its

Lord in the universal (" swiftly arose and

64

Whitman in 1884

spread around me the peace and the
knowledge that pass all the argument of
the earth ") ; and became dedicated to
that service thenceforward ; and all the
conflicting elements of his own nature
and of general nature were seen — as they
must be in such a case — to have their
justification and their use. " The moth
and the fish-eggs are in place."

With Whitman the new perception was
eminently sane and undistorted. It is
probable indeed that never in historical
times has the cosmic intuition found a
fuller and more complete utterance ; for
it was not dwindled away into any mere
thin and other-worldly ecstasy, denying
in a kind of spiritual excess the claims of
the body and the intellect, but was blent
and harmonised, in fiery union, with the
very widest practical experiences and the
inferences of a singularly rich nature.
For the first time in history do we hear

6$ E

Days with Walt Whitman

the voice of a prophet who really knows
and really accepts the whole range of
human life.

The last twenty-five of Whitman's years
were overshadowed by the clouds of par-
tial and intermittent paralysis. From the
miracle of health and strength which he
had been before the war, it was his destiny
to come near to being a chronic invalid.
Unfitted for active life, unfitted even for
much literary work, he quietly accepted
his lot ; and being unable to express his
message in any more resounding way, was
content to fashion the commonplaces of
his daily life to its utterance ; and no one,
I think, could witness the dignity and
simple beauty of this later life without
feeling that here, in its way, was a poem
as pregnant as " Leaves of Grass." Gentle
and humane in manners, the rocky bases
of his nature — if such had been conspicu-
ous before — now covered with tender

66

Whitman in 1884

herbage and flowers, making the most of
small details, fond of children, and with a
pleasant cheery word for all, letting life
come and go with large equanimity, he was
a man whom the simplest could approach
without effort, and who was loved by
hundreds who never read a word of his
writing. If he had a preference, it was
for the " common people." The uncon-
scious, uncultured, natural types pleased
him best, and he would make an effort to
approach them. The others he allowed
to approach him.

67

NOTES AND APPRECIATIONS

(('alt CVLZn

111 I lir <I<14- CT 53

I (111

WHITMAN AS PROPHET

DR. R. MAURICE BUCKE, in his
"Memories of Walt Whitman,"1
speaking of the years 1853-55, and of
the inception of " Leaves of Grass," says,
" A very few years before these dates we
find Walt Whitman writing tales, essays,
sketches, and even poems, which are in no
way distinguishable from that ' mighty
tide of ditch water' which Carlyle tells
us flows day by day from the power-
presses of civilisation. All at once he
writes the greatest book of a great cen-
tury. Where did he get the stuff to

1 "Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers" (Phila-
delphia, 1894), p. 42.

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Days with Walt Whitman

put in it? How did he get it all in a
minute, as it were? Or, if it was in
him before, why did it not show itself?
My memories of Walt Whitman include
many talks, in which I did my best to
obtain light upon these and related pro-
blems. Generally, he would pass over
the subject with a half-answer or a return
question ; at other times he would be
more explicit, as he was one day in the
summer of 1886, when he said — ' Leaves
of Grass was there, though unformed,
all the time, in whatever answers as the
laboratory of the mind. I was more or
less conscious of it, and thought often of
taking action in that direction. But, you
can understand, there was much to deter
— that until the impulse to move had
become very strong, nothing would be
done. I could clearly see that such an
enterprise would meet with little favor
— at all events at first — that it would be

72

Whitman as Prophet

hooted at (as it was) and perhaps hooted
down. The Democratic Review essays
and tales came from the surface of the
mind, and had no connection with what
lay below — a great deal of which indeed
was below consciousness. At last came
the time when the concealed growth had
to come to light, and the first edition of
Leaves of Grass was written and pub-
lished.' "

This phrase, " the concealed growth
had to come to light, " thus preserved for
us by Dr. Bucke, helps much towards the
appreciation of the prophetic and unex-
pected character of " Leaves of Grass."
We do not of course understand why out
of green foliage and branches a sudden
and unexpected blossom — yet evidently
long prepared in the heart of the plant —
should appear ; nor do we understand
why, often amid quite unpromising foliage
of the human mind, a great work of art

73

Days with Walt Whitman

or prophecy arises ; yet we seem to see
that the processes are very similar. A
centre of growth, hitherto unnoticed,
long hidden, has come to light.

Prophecy at all times has this inevit-
able spontaneous character, as of some-
thing arising from below the ordinary
consciousness, which just for the very
reason that it so arises cannot be deliber-
ately quenched or stopped — something
almost inarticulate, hardly gaining the
sphere of definition; irrational, and out
of joint with accepted things ; subversive,
inconvenient, contrary ; annunciative of a
new order. The prophets are stoned ;
for they are obviously liars and icono-
clasts. They are charged with inconsis-
tency, and, poor things ! they cannot deny
the charge. They cannot help themselves.
The flower unfolding out of its own roots
cannot unfold other than it does.

By many such marks Whitman's work

74

Whitman as Prophet

shows a prophetic character. And while
he does not claim to deliver a new Gospel,
he seems to claim to take his place in the
line of those who have handed down a
world - old treasure of redemption for
mankind. In his poem, " To Him that
was Crucified, " * he says : —

" My spirit to yours, dear brother,
Do not mind because many sounding your name

do not understand you,
I do not sound your name, but I understand you,
I specify you with joy, O my comrade, to salute

you, and to salute those that are with you,

before and since, and those to come also,
That we ail labor together transmitting the same

charge and succession^
We few equals, indifferent of lands, indifferent

of times,
We, enclosers of all continents, all castes, allowers

of all theologies,
Compassionaters, perceivers, rapport of men,
We walk silent among disputes and assertions,

but reject not the disputers nor anything

that is asserted,

1 " Leaves of Grass," p. 298.
75

Days with Walt Whitman

We hear the bawling and the din, we are
reach'd at by divisions, jealousies, recrimi-
nations on every side,

They close peremptorily on us to surround us,
my comrade,

Yet we walk unheld, free, the whole earth over,
journeying up and down till we make our
ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse
eras,

Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and
women of races, ages to come, may prove
brethren and lovers as we are."

It will be noticed that in this great
poem he speaks not merely as a successor
of him that was crucified, but as a con-
tinuer of some world-wide and agelong
tradition. And in truth we cannot doubt
that the root of it all has been known and
realised since the farthest history ; the
charge and succession have certainly de-
scended out of dim obscurity from the
earliest times. How much exactly Walt
Whitman may have known of the Vedic
and other early writings is doubtful ; but

that he had read here and there among

76

Whitman as Prophet

them, quite enough to gain an insight into
the heart of them, and to know that
his message was continuous with theirs,
is quite certain. " These are really the
thoughts of men in all ages and lands,
they are not original with me." In the
Vedic scriptures, and, in lineal succession
from these, in the Buddhist and Platonist
and Christian writings, in the Taoists of
China, the Mystics of Egypt, the Sufis
of Persia, the root is to be found —
and is clearly distinguishable — the very
same from which " Leaves of Grass "
has sprung. [It would be too long at
present, by quotations from all these
writings, to attempt to prove this ; but
in an Appendix to this paper I have,
in very imperfect fashion, dotted in a
number of parallel passages from them
and from " Leaves of Grass," and these
may serve to illustrate what I mean.]
A glance at these ancient and modern

77

Days with Walt Whitman

utterances assures us that all down history
the same loving universal spirit has
looked out, making its voice heard from
time to time, harmonising the diverse
eras, enclosing continents, castes, and
theologies. The same charge and suc-
cession has passed on, and Whitman
voices and transmits it in his turn.

Yet of course there are differences.
We cannot say that Whitman is more
subtle, more penetrating, more profound
than many of those who have gone
before. It would be hard to imagine
anything more subtle and profound than
passages in the Upanishads. But in one
respect he is certainly unique among the
prophets, and that is in the universality
and breadth of his appeal. He seems
to liberate the good tidings and give it a
democratic scope and world-wide appli-
cation unknown in the elder prophets,
even in the sayings of Buddha.

78

Whitman as Prophet

The difficulty with the earlier prophets
no doubt was that around them limita-
tions existed on every hand. Races,
peoples, religions, were sharply divided
from each other. In the early world
exclusiveness was indispensable. The
peoples and nations could not have grown
up if each had not believed that its own
customs, morals, religion, race, &c, were
infinitely superior to those of the others.
Exclusiveness and war were the nurses
of growing humanity's powers — of com-
radeship, organised life, community of sen-
timent, courage, self-sacrifice, and all the
early virtues. Problems of social life
and character, which could never have
been solved in a general ocean of man-
kind, were easy to define and determine
in small communities. Ignorance and
prejudice were necessary fences between
one state or system of society and
another. And however great certain

79

Days with Walt Whitman

individual teachers may have been in the
past — however generous and wide their
real outlook on life, they still could only
act and speak subject to the very definite
limitations prevailing around them.1 The
Joels, Jeremiahs, Mohammeds, Carlyles,
— stung no doubt by incontrollable im-
pulse to blaze forth that which was
in them — have delivered their special
messages : have called the people of
their time to gather themselves round
some new centre of life and inspiration,
moral or religious or racial ; and in
doing so have anathematised every other
code of morals or form of religion,
called all outside people Gentiles or Bar-
barians, and put them to the sword.
They have done work priceless in their

1 We have to remember, too, that their sayings
have come down to us only through priestly, local,
racial media. There is not a sacred book that has
not been tampered with, and its teaching distorted
in the direction of narrowing and exclusiveness.

80

Whitman as Prophet

time and locality, insisting on and com-
pelling each some certain and necessary
step in human progress ; and having done
so, they have gone their way and been
superseded, because their message was
only a part-message. Only a few have
not been superseded. Teachers like the
Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Francis,
and the Syrian Bab,1 belong to no race
or nationality ; if they press the claims
of religion or morality, it is with so little
insistence on any particular scheme or code,
that their net may be said to be spread
to catch all humanity. They are accepters
rather than deniers ; they represent the
prophetic gift in its deepest and most
inclusive utterance ; and it is difficult to
think of them as becoming antiquated or
out of date.

Yet — though it would not be acceptable

1 See "Abbas EfTendi," a study of the religion of
the Babis, by M. H. Phelps (Putnams, 1903).

81 F

Days with Walt Whitman

or desirable to make comparisons of great-
ness— we may say that even among these
Whitman was (with the exception perhaps
of the Bab) unique in the realisation of
the world-wide and universal character of
his message. The others had messages
of world-wide import to deliver, though
perhaps they hardly knew this at the
time ; but Whitman realised from the
first that this universality was the very key
and centre of his utterance, and set him-
self deliberately to emphasise it. Many
things conspired, with him, to this re-
sult— the girdling of the earth in his
time, and the extraordinary developments
of locomotion and intercommunication
which were bringing together East and
West, and all races and classes, creeds and
customs, into close touch and acknow-
ledgment of each other. The peoples
were being compelled to see that none of
them has a monopoly of excellence or

8z

Whitman as Prophet

defect, but that all illustrate, in their
various ways, forms of necessary life.
The Press, the Locomotive, the Wire,
were pushing more and more insistently
to this conclusion. The fences were
breaking down ; a new Era was shaping ;
and Whitman himself, by a nature and
temperament of extraordinary balance and
fulness, physical, mental, and moral (" I
can resist anything better than my own
diversity"), was fitted to respond to it
all — to swim in this ocean of humanity
as in a sea.

[Yet even so, and allowing for the
occasioning causes, it must be said that
his utterance, in its daemonic reach and
sweep, is somewhat staggering ! Through
" Leaves of Grass " pours a torrent of
trades, classes, characters, occupations,
races, nations, morals, manners, incidents,
opinions — things generally accounted
beautiful, and things unbeautiful, things

83

Days with Walt Whitman

good or evil, proper or improper — in
huge indifference, all apparently accepted
on an equality, dismissed on an equality.
It is, to certain folk, most confusing,
and at times even revolting and terri-
fying.]

Of this new Era, with all its splen-
dours and terrors, Walt Whitman may
be said to be the prophet. Through the
" barbaric yawp " and seeming-random
medley of his verse — inarticulate enough
at times in its very endeavour to include
and accept every phase and feature of
human life — break out the deep-rolling
organ-tones of Creation's primal music.
We hear the same agelong theme and
symphony of all historic time, gaining,
through whatever imperfections, a larger
freer expression by virtue of its so much
more extended key-board and orchestra, by
virtue of its discords and sequences more
daring than ever used in literature before.

84

Whitman as Prophet

And the Theme ? Whitman has de-
fined it very directly at the first outset
of his poems : —

" One's Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word
En-Masse."

The Self, individual and separate, yet
conjoined and continuous throughout
Creation's mass — that is the theme which
undoubtedly runs through the whole of
his poems and prophetic utterances. And
it is the theme of the eldest Upanishads
of the Vedic sages. It is the theme
which has come down through the ages
— variously balanced, with now some-
what more insistence on one aspect, now
somewhat more on another ; variously
expressed and illustrated, in poetical,
religious, or philosophical form ; variously
coloured, confined, or conventionalised by
race and tradition ; but inevitably gaining

85

Days with Walt Whitman

in the long-run in freedom and fulness
of utterance. In Whitman it breaks out
almost unconsciously — certainly less as
the result of any intellectual process or
argument than by force of an irresistible
impulse — into a strange torrential paean-^
of identity. Everything, the whole earth,
all its shows, men and women, sinners
and saints, the stars, insects, solar systems
— all beings are envisaged in order to
be identified with the One ; they are
accorded each their unique unapproach-
able character and perfection, only to
be embraced : —

" We make our ineffaceable mark upon time and
the diverse eras,
Till we saturate time and eras, that the men and
women of races, ages to come, may prove
brethren and lovers as we are."

So in Whitman all the purblind morals
and moonlight ideals of the past are,
whether directly or by implication, broken

86

Whitman as Prophet

up (hence storm and terror to many) and
led back to their most central motive,
the world-old revelation of the Self,
eternal and inseparate.

" I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the

night,
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday

sunbeams reflected,
And debouch to the steady and central from the

offspring great or small."

Always the inward, the enduring, the
central, the vital, is acknowledged and
honoured ; the external, the temporary,
the unessential thrown off. Underneath
all morals, manners, races, titles, classes,
the original human soul and its affections,
greater than all. Underneath clothing,
costume, ranks, trades, and occupations,
the bodily form, its needs and physiology.
Underneath all art and social life, sex
and fraternity. Greater than all houses,
temples, galleries, and museums, the life

«7

Days with Walt Whitman

of the open air and its lessons. In such
simple elementary things as these — in the
universal human soul, rediscovering itself
in all forms, in the healthy and beautiful
human body, in sex and fraternity, in
the life with the earth and the open air,
Whitman sees the root out of which
future humanity will spring (as it has
sprung in the past) : out of which a
society of proud, strong, free individuals,
who shall also be brethren and lovers,
may easily and naturally arise : —

" Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear
it would not amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women
appear'd it would not astonish me."

We may indeed say that, with the
signal appearance of " Leaves of Grass/*
the hour has struck for mankind of liber-
ation, of emancipation, from mere outer
rules and limitations ; the hour for the
reference of all life, irrespective of colour,
creeds, and principles, to its central essence.

88

Whitman as Prophet

It may be, for reasons already hinted, an
hour of danger. Not a few, accustomed
only to walk by well-worn paths and
formulas, will lose their way. " Take
warning ! He traveling with me needs
the best blood, thews, endurance." But
it is an hour which must needs come ;
and it opens for humanity on an era of
unexampled glory.

And here a word about Individuals.
It will be recognised by all readers of
Whitman that his insistence on the per-
manence, the immortality, the supreme
life of the Individual, is a most marked
feature of his teaching. " The sum of
all known reverence I add up in you
whoever you are." "Yourself! yourself!
yourself for ever and ever ! " " I sing
the songs of the glory of none, not God,
sooner than I sing the songs of the glory
of you." For Whitman every Self in
its essence is individual, eternal, perfect,
accruing to itself alone : " I swear I think

89

Days with Walt Whitman

now that everything without exception
has an eternal soul ! "

" Each man to himself and each woman to herself
is the word of the past and present, and the
true word of immortality ;

No one can acquire for another — not one ;

No one can grow for another — not one."

And yet (strange paradox ! ) all are One.

" Have you thought there could be but a single
Supreme ?
There can be any number of Supremes — one does
not countervail another any more than one
eyesight countervails another, or one life
countervails another."

Each is a simple separate person, and
yet en-rnasse with the rest. I think we
may say that no former teacher has quite
dared to give this side of the truth as
Whitman has done, nor given it with
so free and so splendid an expression.

Thus it may seem that if in the matter

of pure philosophical statement Whitman

does not stand out in the great charge

90

Whitman as Prophet

and succession so strongly as some of
his predecessors, yet in two respects at
least his work is unique : namely, in the
universality and determination of his
appeal to, and brotherhood with, all
creation, and in his insistence on the
root-existence of every Individual from
everlasting to everlasting — his protest,
in fact (though quite indirect), against
a mere doctrine of absorption in the
Universal.

One other point I should like to note
— and it goes with the preceding remarks
— namely, Whitman's extraordinary con-
creteness, and his consistent and set avoid-
ance of abstract doctrine in the highest
regions of thought. "I swear I see what
is better than to tell the best, it is always
to leave the best untold." This avoidance
is so subtle and determined that many
readers are deceived by it into not per-
ceiving " beautiful things well envelop'd,"

91

Days with Walt Whitman

and into thinking Whitman himself did
not perceive them. The reason of it is
clear. Whitman refused to address him-
self to the Brain alone. He saw that
with regard to the highest truths it is
useless to try to seize or impart them
that way. They must be felt as well
as thought. To try to think them alone,
as one would prove a syllogism, is a
kind of blasphemy. And to create the
feeling, the direct awareness and con-
sciousness of the highest facts, one must
proceed in another way ; one must use
the method of Indirection — the method
of Life and Time and the Earth, as well
as of all great Art and Literature — the
appeal through sense and all concrete ex-
perience, penetrating, far-reaching, cumu-
lative in its power, till it wake the
profoundest deeps of the soul. Through
Whitman's pages all the shows of the
Earth, and myriads of concrete images,

9z

Whitman as Prophet

surge and break upon the sensitive mind-
surface of the reader — who in many cases
as little understands or suspects what
their meaning and intention is, as every
child of Man suspects the meaning of
the winds and waters that play around
him as he walks. Nevertheless they con-
vince by their presence. They wake and
build up new ranges of feeling in him.
They filter and fibre his blood. And it
is this concreteness, this power of indirect
appeal, which constitute Whitman great
among the Poets — even as his unrivalled
knowledge of the actual world and of
actual life, and his absolute acceptance of
the same, give him so high a distinction
among the Prophets.

93

APPENDIX TO WHITMAN AS
PROPHET

(Seepage 77)

Passages from early prophetic writ-
ings x :—

" He, the Highest Person, who is awake in us
while we are asleep, shaping one lovely sight
after another ; that indeed is the Bright, that
is Brahman, that alone is called the Immortal."
— Katha Upanishad.

" He is the one God, hidden in all beings, all

1 Compare the following from " Leaves of Grass " : —

" O Thou transcendent,
Nameless, the fibre and the breath,
Light of the light, shedding forth universes . . .
Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,
At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and

Death,
But that I, turning, call to thee O soul, thou

actual Me,
And lo ! thou gently masterest the orbs,
Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,
And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space."

(p. 321.)

94

Appendix to Whitman as Prophet

pervading, the Self within all beings, watching
over all works, dwelling in all beings, the wit-
ness, the Perceiver, the only one, free from
qualities." — Svetasvatara Upanishad.

" The sun does not shine [show] there, nor
the moon and the stars, nor these lightnings, and
much less this fire. When he^ shines, every-
thing shines after him ; by his light all this
[world] is lightened." — Svetasvatara Upanishad.

" As rain water that has fallen on a mountain
ridge runs down on all sides, thus does he who
sees a difference between qualities run after
them on all sides.

" Light rare untellable, lighting the very light,

Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages." (p. 324.)
" Whoever you are ! you are he or she for whom the
earth is solid and liquid ;
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon
hang in the sky." (p. 178.)
u I celebrate Myself,

And what I assume, you shall also assume," (p. 29.)

" Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle,

unitary,
Both in and out of the game, and watching and
wondering at it." (p. 32.)
" Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me,
I stand indifferent." (p. 46.)

95

Days with Walt Whitman

"As pure water poured into pure water re-
mains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of
a thinker who knows." — Katha Upanishad,

" By the serenity of his thoughts a man blots
out all actions, whether good or bad. Dwell-
ing within the Self with serene thoughts he
obtains imperishable happiness." — Maitrayana-
Brahmana Upanishad,

" And he who beholds all beings in the Self,
and the Self in all beings, he never turns away
from it.

"When to a man who understands, the Self
has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble,
can there be to him who once beheld that
unity ? " — Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad,

The Blessed one [Buddha] said to Ananda :
" Both the ocean and my doctrine become

" What is called good is perfect, and what is called
bad is just as perfect." (p. 337.)

" Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and
knowledge that pass all the argument' of the
earth." (p. 32.)

" No array of tenns can say how much I am at peace
about God and about death." (p 76.)

" My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determina-
tion around the whole earth.
I have look'd for equals and lovers, and found them
ready for me in all lands." (p. 120.)
96

Appendix to Whitman as Prophet

gradually deeper. Both preserve their identity
under all changes. Both cast out dead bodies
upon the dry land. As the great rivers, when
falling into the main, lose their name and are
thenceforth reckoned as the great ocean, so
all the castes, having renounced their lineage
and entered the Sangha [brotherhood], become
brethren and are reckoned the sons of Shakya-
muni. The ocean is the goal of all streams and
of the rain from the clouds, yet is it never
overflowing and never emptied ; so the dharma
is embraced by many millions of people, yet it
neither increases nor decreases. As the great
ocean has only one taste, the taste of salt, so my
doctrine has only one flavour, the flavour of
emancipation. Both the ocean and the dharma

"Agonies are one of my changes of garments. I do
not ask the wounded person how he feels, I
myself become the wounded person." (p. 60.)

" I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him
or her who shall be complete/5 (p. 179.)

"All parts away for the progress of souls,
All religion, all solid things, arts, governments — all
that was or is apparent upon this globe, or any
globe, falls into niches and corners before the
procession of souls along the grand roads of the
universe." (p. 127.)

97 0

Days with Walt Whitman

are full of gems and pearls and jewels, and both
afford a dwelling-place for mighty beings.

" My doctrine is pure, and it makes no dis-
crimination between noble and ignoble, rich and
poor. My doctrine is like unto water which
cleanses all without distinction. My doctrine is
like unto fire which consumes all things that exist
between heaven and earth, great and small. My
doctrine is like unto the heavens, for there is room
in it, ample room, for the reception of all, for
men and women, boys and girls, the powerful and
the lowly." — Mahaparinibbana Suttanta, iii. 22.

" He who believes that this spirit can kill,"
says Krishna to Arjuna, "and he who thinks
that it can be killed, both of these are wrong in
judgment. It neither kills, nor is killed. It is
not born, nor dies at any time. It has had no
origin, nor will it ever have an origin.

"As a man abandons worn-out clothes and
takes other new ones, so does the soul quit

" Allons ! whoever you are come travel with me !
Traveling with me you find what never tires."
(p. 125.)
" This is the meal equally set, this the meat for
natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous ;
I make appointments with all." (p. 43.)
98

Appendix to Whitman as Prophet

worn-out bodies, and enter other new ones.
Weapons cannot cleave it. Fire cannot burn
it, nor can water wet it, nor can wind dry it."
— Bhagavad Gita.

" I am the same to all beings. I have neither
foe nor friend. But those who worship me
with devotion dwell in me and I also in them.

" He who discovers inaction in action, and
action in inaction, is wise among mortals.

" The practiser of Yoga, whose spirit is puri-
fied, who has subdued himself and vanquished
his senses, whose Self is the Self of all creatures,
is not polluted even by action." — Ibid.

" I swear I think now that everything has an im-
mortal soul !
I swear I think there is nothing but immortality."

(P- 337-)
" Who, constructing the house of himself or herself,
not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras,
dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space,
inseparable together." (p. 304.)
" I doubt not I have myself died ten thousand times
before.
I receive now again of my many translations, from
my avataras ascending, while others doubtless
await me." (p. 382.)
" You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will
infold you." (p. 66.)

99

Days with Walt Whitman

"Tao as it exists in the world is like the
great rivers and seas which receive the streams
from the valleys.

" All pervading is the great Tao. It can be at
once on the right hand and on the left. All
things depend on it for life, and it rejects them
not. Its task accomplished, it takes no credit.
It loves and nourishes all things, but does not
act as master. It is ever free from desire.

"We may call it small. All things return
to it, yet it does not act as master. We may
call it great.

" The whole world will flock to him who

holds the mighty form of Tao. They will come

and receive no hurt, but find rest, peace, and

tranquillity." — Sayings of Lao-tzu.

/"By non - action there is nothing which

" All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor re-
sist it, . . .
The insignificant is as big to me as any." (p. 53.)
" I am possess'd !

Embody all presences outlaw'd or suffering." (p. 64.)
" I will toss a new gladness and roughness among
them,
Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,
Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and
shall bless me." (p. 123.)
100

Appendix to Whitman as Prophet

cannot be done. Failure is the foundation of
success, and the means by which it is achieved.
Success is the lurking-place of failure ; and who
can tell when the turning-point will come ?

" He who acts, destroys ; he who grasps, loses.
Therefore the sage does not act, and so does not
destroy ; he does not grasp, and so he does not lose.

" Only he who does nothing for his life's sake
can truly be said to value his life.

" When the great Tao falls into disuse, bene-
volence and righteousness come into vogue.
Cast off your holiness, rid yourself of your
cleverness, and the people will benefit an hun-
dredfold."— Ibid.

" I am the Way [Tao, the open Road], the
Truth, and the Life.

"Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypo-
crites ! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven
against men : for ye neither go in yourselves,
neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

" Vivas to those who have fail'd !" (p. 43.)
" What is providence is indivisible,
Declines to separate one part of life from every

part, . . .
Knows that the young man who composedly peril'd
his life and lost it has done exceedingly well
for himself without doubt." (p. 291.)
101

Days with Walt Whitman

Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypo-
crites ! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a
pretence make long prayers : therefore ye shall
receive the greater damnation.

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take
my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I
am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find
rest unto your souls.

" For whosoever will save his life shall lose it ;
but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and
the good tidings, the same shall save it.

" And lo ! I am with you alway, even unto
the end of the world." — Jesus in the Gospels.

" Sleep — I and they keep guard all night ;
Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger

upon you.
I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you

to myself,
And when you rise in the morning you will find
what I tell you is so." (p. 66.)
" Camerado, I give you my hand,
I give you my love more precious than money."
(P- 129.)
" Toward you all, in America's name,
I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the

signal,
To remain after me in sight forever,
For all the haunts and homes of men." (p. 120.)

102

THE POETIC FORM OF
"LEAVES OF GRASS"

/^F all the tribes of specially literary
\~J people (one sometimes thinks), of
the Popes, Drydens, Swinburnes, Paters,
the Brownings or Tennysons even, not to
mention hosts of lesser names — which of
them, after all, as time goes on, and
except for certain antiquarian interests
and a few passages which represent the
real unloading of the writers' hearts, will
really be affectionately remembered or
persistently read ? A few pithy passages,
of verse or tale, enshrining some vivid
sharp experience — and for the rest what

a deluge of words ! The touch on actual

103

Days with Walt Whitman

life so thin, so poor, so ignorant. The
society, yes, which animates itself round
a Rape of a Lock, or discusses Broad
Church questions over the walnuts and the
wine, is there — but of the great world,
what ? A shade of sentiment or of
thought, interesting enough, no doubt,
and which may happen to be in vogue
among a certain class — but of the great
reaches of human passion and experience
how much — or how little ? Words, words,
and fine-spun forms out of the thinnest
basis of material ! At every turn of the
page gross misapprehensions and igno-
rance of the actual lives and conditions
of life and heart of the thousands and
millions and thousand-millions of the
earth ! How can these things hold any
readers except those whose outlook is
equally blinkered ? The purely literary
work has its interest, has its place ; but

its appeal is so limited.

104

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

With Whitman, the workman, the
normal (or " average") man — for of
course the man who deals with materials
and wins his living from them is the
normal man — comes, for the first time,
in a deliberate and representative way,
into literature. He comes, not as a man
who abandons his former mode of life
in order to seek a literary ideal, but as
the master-workman who slays where
he is and uses literary form for his own
expression — and with the same direct-
ness and mastery that he uses towards
life. Hence a new era of literature —
a literature appealing to all who deal
with life directly, and know what it is,
a literature which will be read and
lovingly absorbed by the millions as
time goes on.

We may perhaps say that in every great

artist there is something of the manner

of the workman. In Michel Angelo, in

105

Days with Walt Whitman

Beethoven, in Velasquez, in Pheidias, in
Dante — a certain clearing for action,
economy, directness, decisiveness. The
good workman wants to make his work
absolutely effective. That is his first
thought. The great artist will not stop
short of the most clear and perfect expres-
sion. He will do nothing to cloud it.
In a note of Whitman's, for his own use,
we find recommended as a rule for com-
position " the most translucid clearness
without variation." l And every one must
feel that the first and root-criterion of
form is Expression. If the work conveys
the meaning perfectly, then obviously any
change of form (which necessarily must
bring some change of meaning with it)
will be a loss. Therefore, the expression
being perfect, the form is also perfect.
The two cannot be separated. We may

i " Notes and Fragments," left by Walt Whitman,
and edited by R. M. Bucke (1899), p. 70.

106

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

analyse or examine the form in such a
case — but to propose to alter it is mere
foolishness. Read again the poem " To
Him that was Crucified/' quoted in the
preceding paper, and realise the wonderful
burden of thought and emotion conveyed,
and then also realise that a single word
displaced or altered anywhere in the poem
would blur or diminish its total message
and expression.

Is it possible indeed in these cases of
perfect excellence, to stop and examine
the form as a thing apart ? I do not say
that it is impossible ; but it is surely very
difficult. Are there not some pieces of
music so beautiful, that though we try
again and again while hearing them to
analyse their form, we simply fail to
do so ? And are there not poems of
which the mind refuses to count the
syllables. Read, for example, the follow-
ing from " Leaves of Grass": —

107

Days with Walt Whitman

RECONCILIATION

Word over all, beautiful as the sky !

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage

must in time be utterly lost ;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night

incessantly softly wash again, and ever

again, this soil'd world.
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself

is dead.
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the

coffin — I draw near ;
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the

white face in the coffin.

Here underneath, all the time, one
feels a subtle impalpable metre pulsing.
Some one possibly may be able to dis-
entangle and define that metre ; but I
confess that I can't — simply because, each
time I read, the meaning holds and fills
my mind too full. Let a thing be said
with such animation and directness that
you try in vain to think of the form, then
surely that form is perfect, whatever it is !
The form vanishes in the meaning ; and

108

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

that is what our bodies will one day do
— not disappear from sight, but so glow
and be suffused in what they convey, as
to cease to have any separate existence.1

There is no need, to-day, to justify
Whitman's forms and rhythms, any more
than there is need to justify those of
Beethoven or Brahms or Wagner. There
are good country folk who delight to sit
and beat time with hand or foot to the
village band ; and there are folk who only
recognise a ballad metre in poetry ; but
they need not detain us. Ballad metres
have an excellent and charming use and

1 " I had not dreamed," says Mrs. Gilchrist in A
Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman, " that words
could cease to be words, and become electric streams
like these. I do assure you that, strong as I am, I
sometimes feel as if I had not bodily strength to read
many of these poems. In the series headed ' Calamus,'
for instance, in some of the ' Songs of Parting,' the
'Voice out of the Sea,' the poem beginning 'Tears,
Tears/ &c, there is such a weight of emotion, such
a tension of the heart, that mine refuses to beat under
it — stands quite still — and I am obliged to lay the book
down for a while."

109

Days with Walt Whitman

quality, but they do not cover the whole
ground.

There are two things in literature
which demand expression — roughly, brain
and heart. On the one hand, mere
fact, description, argument ; on the other,
mood, emotion, mental colouring. As
the extreme type of the one, we have
books of law, science, mathematics ; as
the extreme type of the other, and lying
beyond literature, music. In literature
proper, there is always of course a blend
or admixture of the two elements ; but
those works which express a predomi-
nance of the mental and scientific element
come under the head of prose, and those
which express predominant emotion come
under the head of poetry and approach
the musical in form. Just as in music
every mood has its rhythm — light jingles
of dances, lulling, swaying cradle-songs,
ballad-refrains, swelling love-songs, strong

no

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

marches, or great symphonic metres in-
cluding these — so in poetry. " Wherever
there is emotion concerned in the thought
there will be emotional effects in the
language — that is, there will be rhythm ;
and the wave-like rhythms and rhymes
and recurrences will take on the simplest
and briefest, or the most complex and far-
reaching forms, according to the character
of the emotion concerned." 1

The underlying and dominant mood of
Whitman's poems, corresponding to his
theme, is extraordinarily vast and in-
clusive— and it requires for its expression
a rhythm of similarly broad and flexible
character. It is obvious that such emo-
tions as he deals with could never be
caged in a symmetrical verse or stanza.

" I have not so much emulated the birds that
musically sing,
I have abandoned myself to flights, broad circles,

1 "Angels' Wings," by E. Carpenter (1898), p. 73.

in

Days with Walt Whitman

The hawk, the sea-gull, have far more possess'd
me than the canary or mocking-bird.

I have not felt to warble and trill, however
sweetly,

I have felt to soar in freedom and in the fulness
of power, joy, volition. "

But in thus soaring in freedom and
the fulness of power and joy he finds a
rhythm and a music of his own. " I see,"
says Anne Gilchrist, " that no counting of
syllables will reveal the mechanism of
the music ; and that this rushing spon-
taneity could not stay to bind itself with
the fetters of [formal] metre. But I
know that the music is there, and that
I would not for something change ears
with those who cannot hear it." 1

Whitman needed for his expression a

poetical form of the utmost flexibility —

capable of adaptation to the widest ranges

of his immense personality. It is, in fact,

1 " A Woman's Estimate," now republished among
the papers in "In re Walt Whitman" (McKay.
Philadelphia, 1893).

112

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

his personality which forms the organic
centre of " Leaves, of Grass." He calls
the latter (see " A Backward Glance o'er
Travel'd Roads ") " an attempt from first
to last, to put a Person, a human being
(myself, in the latter half of the Nine-
teenth Century, in America) freely, fully,
and truly on record." As a work of art,
therefore, " Leaves of Grass " ought to
stand whole, unbroken, undivided, and
grouped round the central presence of the
author. " Who touches this, touches a
man." — " In regard to the unity and con-
struction of the poems," says John Bur-
roughs in " The Flight of the Eagle," x
" the reader sooner or later discovers the
true solution to be, that the dependence,
cohesion, and final reconciliation of the
whole are in the personality of the poet
himself. . . . When Tennyson sends out
a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a

1 " Birds and Poets" (New York, 1877), p. 234.

113 H

Days with Walt Whitman

peach ; slowly wrought out and dismissed,
it drops from his boughs holding a con-
ception or an idea that spheres it and
makes it whole. It is completed, distinct,
and separate — might be his, or might be
any man's. It carries his quality, but it
is a thing of itself, and centres and de-
pends upon itself. Whether or not the
world will hereafter consent, as in the
past, to call only beautiful creations of
this sort Poems, remains to be seen. But
this is certainly not what Walt Whitman
does, or aims to do, except in a few cases.
He completes no poems, apart and sepa-
rate from himself, and his pages abound
in hints to that effect : —

" * Let others finish specimens — I never finish
specimens ;
I shower them by exhaustless laws, as Nature
does, fresh and modern continually.'

His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves

of force, indefinite dynamics, formless,

1x4

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

constantly emanating from the living
centre, and they carry the quality of the
author's personal presence with them in a
way that is unprecedented in literature."

And again Whitman says (I am quot-
ing from the edition of i860) : —

" I will not make poems with reference to parts,
But I will make leaves, poems, poemets, songs,

says, thoughts, with reference to ensemble ;
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but

with reference to all days,
And I will not make a poem, nor the least part

of a poem, but has reference to the Soul,
Because, having looked at the objects of the

universe, I find there is no one, nor any

particle of one, but has reference to the

Soul."

The ultimate form therefore of Whit-
man's poems is the form of himself, of
the Soul as individualised and uttered in
him. As looking at the ocean, boundless
and reaching far beyond our ken, we yet
recognise in each wave the form of the
sea which gives it birth ; so in reading

"5

Days with Walt Whitman

" Leaves of Grass" we recognise in each
poem or poemet the form and unifying
law of the author. Indeed there is a
singular resemblance in the great mea-
sured yet irregular roll of Whitman's
lines to the onset of waves along a shore
— now creeping white and low in long
successive array, now madly surging and
towering in spray, now lipping sunlit and
blue upon the land. Every mood, at one
time or another, is there and to be recog-
nised— yet underneath, and greater than
all, and illustrated by them all, the law
and life of the ocean itself.

While all Whitman's poems are thus
parts of a whole, and must gain their deepest
meanings and interpretations through a
study of the whole, there are some which
are almost unintelligible except in this re-
lation— mere ejaculations, single sentences,
or not even so much as single sentences

(see Kosmos, " Leaves of Grass," p. 303,

116

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

also pp. 217, 218). Of these, Burroughs'
remarks about their non-completion, except
in relation to the poet's personality, are
true in the most literal way. Of others,
there is a decided sense of artistic com-
pletion in themselves, though still sub-
sidiary to the total work. And it is
interesting, with regard to this subject of
form, to see how Whitman gains in these
latter cases his artistic unity.

One of the most frequent and char-
acteristic devices of his writing is the use
of a very long sentence. By the phrasing
of his lines the construction of a very
lengthy sentence can be kept clear and
effective, while the meaning and burden
of it can be piled up and elaborated,
till at last the total can be discharged
upon the reader with overwhelming effect.
Many of his poems (e.g. " When I heard
the learn'd astronomer," p. 214; or, "I

sit and look out," p. 215; or those

117

Days with Walt Whitman

two from Children of Adam, " Ages and
ages returning," and " We too, how long
we were fool'd," pp. 92 and 93), are
constructed on this plan. They are just
one single sentence, and convey one uni-
tary effect. Others, though consisting of
more than one sentence, are still the same
in principle. Often by repeating the form
of the sentence ("I see, I see ; " "I hear,
I hear "), he gains a like result. What a
wonderful poem is that Salut au Monde,
in which these sights and sounds, of the
whole world, these lists and processions
of earth-dwellers, these appeals to you,
you, you, "whoever you are," pile up,
in strange surging and swelling reiteration
— till at last they break out and break
down in the final four lines : —

" Toward you all, in America's name,
I raise high the perpendicular hand, I make the

signal,
To remain after me in sight for ever,
For all the haunts and homes of men."
118

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

Here the picture of the immense earth,

and the poet's relation to it, is the central

motive. In another, the open road is

the figure which holds all together. In

another, the Brooklyn Ferry. In another,

the broad axe. And in all, as I have said

before, a deep pulsating music, easy to

catch, though difficult to define.

Often the music is that of " recitative "

— sonorous, bold, free, not returning into

itself like a melody, but moving forward

with suggestions of things to follow.

This is perhaps the most general and

characteristic of Whitman's musical effects.

See, for instance, that strange poem : —

" As Adam early in the morning,
Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep,
Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,
Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my

body as I pass,
Be not afraid of my body."

How finely that might be set to music

— solemn, mystic, appealing, oracular ! Or

read " Old Ireland" (p. 284) in the same

119

Days with Walt Whitman

connection, and countless other poems or
portions of poems. In the " Ox-tamer "
(p. 307) there is much the same recitative
effect, with more metrical return and
melody. More rhythmical and melodic
still is that beautiful " Vigil Strange," on
p. 238, or the "Sight in Camp," p. 240;
and more so still perhaps, the well-known
" Come up from the fields, father," p.
236. In many of these we notice dis-
tinct refrains and recurrences, not only
of lines, but of metres — often a return
at the end to the refrain of the beginning,
as in the " Ox-tamer " or the " March in
the ranks hard prest," or " The bivouac's
fitful flame " ; often a recurrence through-
out of a certain type of line — as of
anapests (six-foot) in " Come up from
the fields " : —

" But now from the fields come, father, come at
the daughter's call,
And come to the entry, mother, to the front
door come right away,"

120

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass '

or some other sort of refrain, as in " Beat,
Beat, Drums ! " (p. 222), or in "Gods"

(P- 2I3).

" Lover divine and perfect comrade,
Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain,
Be thou my God."

Finally we have a few in distinct stanzas
and set metre (or nearly so) like " O
Captain" (p. 262), or "Pioneers" (p.
183), or the " Dirge for Two Veterans"
(p. 246) ; but on the whole these are not
the most characteristic or satisfactory of
his pieces.

For short poems held together by a
distinct mood and music of their own
(even if the latter be hard to define), turn
to " To Him that was Crucified," already
quoted, or to ct To a Common Prosti-
tute," or to those wonderful lyric ejacu-
lations " Tears " (p. 204), or " Darest
thou now, O soul" (p. 338), or "The

121

Days with Walt Whitman

Last Invocation " (p. 346), with their
solemn organ-tones.

In two of his long poems, namely,
" Out of the Cradle " (p. 1 96), and " When
lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,"
Whitman has by a combination of some
of the devices above mentioned produced
an artistic effect and unity which is very
remarkable, and which has made these
poems general favourites. The unitary
scene and landscape in both cases, the
recurrence of certain emblems, lilac and
star and grey-brown bird or sagging
moon and sea, the rhythmic songs intro-
duced of love and death, and the sobbing
melody of the surge throughout the first
mentioned poem, and the repeated music
of the Lincoln Hymn : —

" O how shall I warble myself for the dead one
there I loved ?
And how shall I deck my song for the large
sweet soul that has gone ?
122

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass ,:

And what shall my perfume be for the grave of
him I love ?

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of
my soul,"

— all these things give to these two great
poems an artistic unity and distinction
which single them somewhat out from
the rest, and grant them (unlike some
others of Whitman's) to stand alone as it
were, and on their own merits.

Nevertheless it must be said, and some-
what in defence of John Burroughs' posi-
tion, that these two poems, beautiful as
they are, are not so characteristic, so deeply
fascinating and impressive, so central in
the whole scheme and cosmos of " Leaves
of Grass," as those other great poems,
which, though not so obviously metrical
or artistically balanced and complete, are
governed more directly by the presence
and direct utterance of the personality
behind them : I mean, of course, first and

iz3

Days with Walt Whitman

foremost, the " Song of Myself," and after-
wards the two series, Children of Adam
and Calamus, and such poems as "By
Blue Ontario's Shore," " The Answerer ,1
(p. 134), "The Sleepers" (p. 325), "To
Think of Time" (p. 333), "Sunset"
(P- 374), uVocalism" (p. 297), "So
Long " (p. 380), and many others. There
is in these poems an extraordinary oracular
prophetic utterance which lifts them right
through the sphere of art, and out of it,
into something above. "No one will get
at my verses," he says,1 " who insists upon
viewing them as a literary performance,
or attempt at such performance, or as
aiming mainly towards art or aestheti-
cism." It is in this quality in Whitman's
work, transcending art, yet indeed only
possible through the patient study, through
the perfection and final surrender of art,

1 See "A Backward Glance o'er TravePd Roads,"
the prose Appendix to "Leaves of Grass" (Small,
Maynard & Co., Boston, 1897).

124

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

that the secret of his power lies. In his
poems of this order a technical unity is
not demanded (though it may be found
in some of them) because they speak in
the name of that Self which is and re-
mains the unity of all things — the wind
which bloweth where it listeth over the
world. They have no need to seek for
unity and beauty, because in uttering the
Self these things are already given and
found. Here is a great mystery, difficult
to express. No wonder that in that truly
oracular poem, " Vocalism " (p. 297),
Whitman announces so great, so almost
terrifying and impossible an apprentice-
ship before " the divine power to speak
words " can come and be loosened in man
or woman — nothing less than the circling
of all experience, and the final surrender :

" For only at last after many years, after chastity,
friendship, procreation, prudence and naked-
ness,

125

Days with Walt Whitman

After treading ground and breasting river and

lake,
After a loosen'd throat, after absorbing eras,

temperaments, races, after knowledge, free-
dom, crimes,
After complete faith, after clarifyings, elevations,

and removing obstructions,
After these and more, it is just possible there

comes to a man, a woman, the divine

power to speak words. . . .
Surely, whoever speaks to me in the right voice,

him or her I shall follow,
As the water follows the moon, silently, with

fluid steps, anywhere around the globe/ '

It is here no case of neglecting art ;
but technical art and all its devices are
only a very very small part of the ap-
prenticeship. Before the deep music and
beauty of these greatest poems we can
only stand silent, absorbing indeed, but
in no mood to analyse. Something
greater than mortal speaks to us in
them, some voice blended of ages and
ages and vistas of human experience.

Something more even than human ; for

126

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass '

Nature, the prairies and the lakes, the
ocean and the forest by some hidden
magic become vocal in them :

M I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven,
O suns — O grass of graves — O perpetual transfers

and promotions,
If you do not say anything how can I eay

anything ? "

• • • • •

" The woodman that takes his axe and jug with
him shall take me with him all day,

The farm-boy, ploughing in the field, feels good
at the sound of my voice,

In vessels that sail my words sail, I go with
fishermen and seamen and love them.

The soldier camp'd or upon the march is mine,
On the night ere the pending battle many seek

me, and I do not fail them,
On that solemn night (it may be their last) those

that know me seek me."

Whitman, by his vast command of and
sympathy with the things of the actual
world, by his strange interpenetration and
identity with the elemental whole, has

in these great poems revealed a presence

127

Days with Walt Whitman

which, as long as the waters glisten and
the leaves rustle, can never pass or
cease to speak to us ; and as in ancient
days, from some cavern on a mountain
side, a voice in divine frenzy issuing was
taken to be that of the Earth-god before
whose eyes past and future are one, so
from these writings the music arising
seems to be the inspiration and part-
utterance even of ageless Nature herself.

For the rest there are, of course, defi-
ciences and weaknesses. As hinted earlier
in this book, the voluminous power which
marshals and holds in leash whole bat-
talions of phrases, to hurl them finally
on the reader with irresistible effect, some-
times fails ; and then we get a lumbering,
disjointed, effbrted movement which is
the reverse of admirable. Whitman's
later poems, though interesting in many
ways, do often show this deficiency of in-
spiration and some consequent lapse into

128

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

mannerisms ; and his prose perhaps shows
the same more frequently.

To the reader coming to these works
for the first time, the disregard of con-
ventions in every direction is so great,
that it sometimes attracts all his atten-
tion, rendering him insensible to the
interior message, and annoying him with
a suspicion of mere affectation. "If he
only were not obscene," says such a
reader, " or slangy, or prosaic, or contra-
dictory ; if he only would not put in
lists of trades, or of seaport towns, or
lines that ramble at large across all the
proprieties of metre and grammar — we
could endure him ! But thus and thus
he is intolerable." It is only after some
familiarity and a gradual change of the
point of view and perspective, that the
reader begins to see that much which he
thought affected is perfectly natural and

in place. "To speak with the perfect

129 1

Days with Walt Whitman

rectitude and insouciance of the move-
ments of animals, and the unimpeachable-
ness of the sentiment of trees in the
woods, and grass by the roadside," is
Whitman's own standard, and the more
one reads the more I think one is com-
pelled to acknowledge his near approach
to it. That he uses the parlance of
common folk instead of the set phrases
of the learned is not an affectation, but
simply what Dante, and Chaucer, and
Pushkin, and many another pioneer of
a national literature has done ; that he
speaks freely of physiological things is
not obscenity, but a deliverance from it ;
that his handling of facts appears prosaic
or unemotional may easily arise from the
reader's own want of association with the
facts that are handled.

In all these cases of a new or unfamiliar
style (as in painting or music) the inter-
pretations do not yield themselves till

130

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

the new point of view has been seized.
Whitman has often been accused of want
of humour — and it is notorious that
nothing is more elusive and variable as
between people and people — English,
Scotch, French, German, American — than
just this sense of humour. But no one
who knows " Leaves of Grass " well can
fail to detect the fund of quiet humour
constantly flowing there beneath the
surface. It has been said, No one with
any sense of the comic could have written
the lines : —

" Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death, and test propositions"

But does it follow that because a minor

poet might fear to use such an expression,

lest it should excite a smile, Whitman

would also have been afraid, and have

refused it, even though the expression

exactly conveyed his meaning ? And

again, a phrase like " test propositions "

131

Days with Walt Whitman

may well appear comic at Oxford or
Cambridge, and yet perfectly serene and
sensible on an American prairie. These
things are a little difficult to locate.

All the same it must be said that the
poet does, in this way and at times, put
a considerable strain upon his admirers !
as when he writes : —

" O setting sun ! though the time has come,
I still warble under you, if none else does, un-
mitigated adoration,"

or again —

" I will report all heroism from an American
point of view."

And there are affectations — or rather, I

think. I should say, cases in which he has

of set purpose adopted forms and attitudes

not perfectly natural and spontaneous.

For the most part his work is marvellously

spontaneous, and, in its prophetic way,

deriving at once from instinctive and

132

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

subconscious regions ; but there is no
doubt (he says so himself) that in parts
he " set himself" very deliberately to do
certain things. And it is in these parts
that I think he is least successful. Thus
he set himself to vaunt and magnify
" these States " in season and out of season
(a good purpose in moderation, but rather
overdone) ; to ignore all stock-poetic
and classic forms and allusions whatever
(a practice which cripples him at times),
even to the extent of proscribing May and
June in favour of Fifth-month and Sixth-
month ; and to coin and introduce if
possible various hybrid and denationalised
words, like Camerado, Santa Spirita, I ex-
pose, and so forth (a matter in which he
has often been anything but successful).
These set efforts, which also appear some-
times in the construction of his poems,
detract at such times from the winging
singing quality of his work, and give

*33

Days with Walt Whitman

a sense as of chains dragged along the
ground.

Of these weaknesses and deficiencies,
however, I must say that in the long-run
they do not seem to me to bulk very
largely. Though they may do so at first,
and may seem serious, yet it is surprising
how with continued reading they wane
and lose their importance in the general
splendour and adequacy of expression.
And personally — with regard to the many
quaint and outlandish things in Whit-
man— though they may cause a ripple
in the mind, I find that they do not
for me spoil the general effect, any more
than for one sailing into New York
harbour the splendid vista of shipping
and shores is spoiled by the sight of a
bottle or other such object borne on
the blue and sunlit tide.

And when on the other hand one
regards the extraordinary and admitted

134

Poetic Form of " Leaves of Grass "

felicity and perfection of a vast number
of his phrases, the absoluteness of the
rendering and expression of some of the
most difficult and subtle things, one sees
that these quaintnesses, whatever may be
their cause, certainly do not arise from
lack of literary ability. The man who
could write "the large unconscious
scenery of my land with its lakes and
forests," or " the gentle soft-born measure-
less light," or " dark mother always
gliding near with soft feet," or "the
yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent,
sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,"
was without doubt a master of expres-
sion. And I may conclude this paper
with the words of Addington Symonds
(" A Study of Walt Whitman," p. 150) :
" The countless clear and perfect phrases
he invented, to match most delicate
and evanescent moods of sensibility, to
picture exquisite and broad effects of

«35

Days with Walt Whitman

natural beauty, to call up poignant or
elusive feelings, attest to his artistic
faculty of using language as a vehicle for
thought. They are hung, like golden
medals of consummate workmanship and
incised form, in rich clusters over every
poem he produced. And, what he aimed
at above all, these phrases are redolent
of the very spirit of the emotions they
suggest, communicate the breadth and
largeness of the natural things they indi-
cate, embody the essence of realities in
living words which palpitate and burn
for ever."

13b

WALT WHITMAN'S
CHILDREN

TTENRY B. BINNS, in his "Life of

A A Walt Whitman," lately published,

discusses at some length the question of

Whitman's paternity ; and seems to arrive

at the conclusion that the poet formed

at least one relationship (this one probably

at New Orleans in 1848) which led to

the birth of a child or children.

Mr. Binns founds his discussion on an

article of mine originally published in the

Reformer (Feb. 1902); and, premising

that in his book (pp. 51-3 and 349-50)

he has added not a little to the evidence,

I reprint the main portions of my article

below, as follows : —

137

Days with Walt Whitman

" In regard to Whitman's most personal
and intimate relations there is curiously
little known. Every one is aware that he
was never married — that is, in any formal
and acknowledged way. His life after
the Civil War was clouded by intermittent
paralysis, bringing with it invalidism and
infirmity ; and of his history before his
arrival in Washington, i.e., prior to the
age of forty-four or so — the period when
he would be most likely to knit up
such relations — only the barest outline
is known.

" ' Leaves of Grass,' that extraordinary
piece of self -revelation, gives us the
mental attitude of the author. And per-
haps (it may be said) we ought to be con-
tent with that ; because if we know the
mental and emotional attitude of a man
we know the main thing. His external
life and actions depend largely on

accidental circumstances and conditions,

i38

Walt Whitman's Children

his inner attitude is the expression of
himself alone. * Leaves of Grass '
reveals to us a man, to whom the most
intimate relations with his fellow men
and women were familiar (at any rate in
thought), and beautiful (at least in their
proper time and place). The urge
to closest contact appears everywhere
through his poems : ' I sing the body
electric' — ' the body of my love, the
body of the woman I love, the body of
the man, the body of the earth.' He is
not satisfied with communication through
words and printed pages, or by the mere
looking at photographic portraits : —

" ' Not words of routine this song of mine,
But abruptly to question, to leap beyond yet

nearer bring :
This printed and bound book — but the printer

and the printing-office boy ?
The well-taken photographs — but your wife or

friend close and solid in your arms ? '

" And in the poet's announcement and

139

Days with Walt Whitman

summary of his own work, written by
Whitman close after the issue of the first
edition of c Leaves of Grass/ he says of
himself : ' Right and left he flings his
arms, drawing men and women with un-
deniable love to his close embrace, loving
the clasp of their hands, the touch of
their necks and breasts, and the sound of
their voices. All else seems to burn up
under his fierce affection for persons.'

" It would not of course be reasonable
to suppose that all the personal utterances,
of acts done, of passions expressed, of ex-
periences lived through, or of individuals
loved — which are to be found in * Leaves
of Grass ' — are to be taken as literal
records of things which actually happened
to the author himself. They could
hardly be gathered into a single lifetime.
Yet one can see that they are to be taken
as experiences, either actual or potential,

for which his inner spirit was prepared —

140

Walt Whitman's Children

and as a record of things which he could
freely accept, understand, and find place
for. 'Through the period from 1837 to
1848/ says John Burroughs, 'without
entering into particulars, it is enough to
say that he sounded all experiences of
life, with all their passions, pleasures, and
abandonments. He was young, in perfect
bodily condition, and had the city of
New York and its ample opportunities
around him. I trace this period in some
of the poems in the Children of Adam,
and occasionally in other parts of his
book, including Calamus} Certainly at
times in these poems one can hardly avoid
the conclusion that he is describing an
actual bit of his own history — as in that
poem : —

* " Once I passed through a populous city imprinting
my brain for future use with its shows,
architecture, customs, traditions,

1 John Burroughs, in " Walt Whitman : as Poet
and Person." (New York, 1867.)

141

Days with Walt Whitman

Yet now of all that city I remember cfoly a
woman I casually met there, who detained
me for love of me,

Day by day and night by night we were together
— all else has long been forgotten by me.

I remember I say only that woman who passion-
ately clung to me.

Again we wander, we love, we separate again ;

Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,

I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and
tremulous. " '

" In a life so full and rich as Whitman's
there must have been many such personal
experiences, of which the world knows
nothing, and will know nothing. He
has himself told his friends that he had
children — and in a letter to J. Addington
Symonds (dated 19th August 1890), he
mentioned that he had had six. Symonds
writing to me in 1893 quoted the passage
in question from this letter of Whitman's,
and it runs as follows : —

"'My life, young manhood, mid-age,

times South, &c, have been jolly bodily,

142

Walt Whitman's Children

and doubtless open to criticism. Though
unmarried I have had six children — two
are dead — one living Southern grandchild,
fine boy, writes to me occasionally — cir-
cumstances (connected with their fortune
and benefit) have separated me from inti-
mate relations.'

" This is all, apparently, that the letter
contained with reference to the fact of
Whitman's paternity ; but it is sufficient
to establish the fact. Concerning the said
children, and their mother, or mothers,
there may be other evidence or infor-
mation in existence ; and if so, it would
be interesting and important to elicit it.1

" I have heard people affirm their

1 For some evidence that Whitman in his later
years not unfrequently alluded to the fact of his
fatherhood, see Binns' " Life of Whitman,'' p. 349.
It is also supposed that, the lady at New Orleans
being of aristocratic connection, her family would
only recognise the children on condition of their
fatherhood being concealed ; and that these were
the circumstances which separated Whitman "from
intimate relations" with them.

143

Days with Walt Whitman

' moral certainty ' that Whitman never
had any intimate relations with women,
and that all the expressions in ' Leaves of
Grass ' which seem to point that way, are
merely Platonic, or fanciful, or allegorical
— but it is not very easy to see on what
such ' moral certainty ' could in any case
be founded ; and in the face of the above
extract from Whitman's own letter, it
would certainly have to be abandoned.

" On the other hand it would be a
rash, and I think a wrong conclusion
to suppose that because Whitman had
several children (out of the bounds of
formal marriage) he was therefore a dis-
solute and uncontrolled person, much
given to casual liaisons with the opposite
sex. We know nothing, as I have said,
of the circumstances which led to these
connections, nor have we the material for
passing any judgment of the kind referred

to — even if we were so disposed. We

144

Walt Whitman's Children

know at any rate that in his later life
Walt was singularly discreet, almost re-
served, in his relations with women ; and
in that very interesting interview with
Pete Doyle, which is given by Dr. Bucke
in his edition of Whitman's letters to
Pete * — one of the best running accounts
of Walt which we have, though of course
quite extempore — Pete says in one pas-
sage : — ' I never knew a case of Walt's
being bothered up by a woman. In fact,
he had nothing special to do with any
woman, except Mrs. O'Connor and Mrs.
Burroughs. His dispositon was different.
Woman in that sense never came into his
head.'

" Though there are points in the in-
terpretation of this passage which are
not quite clear, it at any rate conveys
the impression of Whitman's reserve

1 " Calamus : A Series of Letters," &c. (Small,
Maynard & Co. Boston, 1897.)

145 k

Days with Walt Whitman

towards the other sex ; and seems in
one part to suggest that his ' disposition '
was unfavorable to close relations with
women.1

" Pete's view in either case may appear
a little difficult to reconcile with the six
children ; but then we must remember
that the inception of the latter and the
' times South ' of Whitman's letter would
belong to an early date — including pro-
bably his visit to New Orleans in 1848-49
— before he was thirty years of age. And
the Whitman of that time might well
differ somewhat in disposition from the
Whitman of twenty years later when Pete
knew him.

1 In a conversation reported by Horace Traubel
(" In re Walt Whitman," p. 34), George Whitman,
the poet's brother, seems to take much the same
general view as Pete. He says : " Although I am
asked that question, I am confident I never knew
Walt to fall in love with young girls, or even to
show them marked attention. He did not seem to
affect the girls."

146

Walt Whitman's Children

" That Whitman was not by any means
insensible to the charms of the fair sex,
even in this later period, is indicated by
the following extract (dated October
1868), from one of his own letters to
Pete — though it will be seen that there
is a certain histrionic air about the passage
which suggests that it should not be taken
too seriously : — ' I also made love to the
women, and flatter myself that I created at
least one impression — wretch and gay de-
ceiver that I am. The truth is, Peter,
that I am here at the present time mainly
in the midst of female women, some of
them young and jolly, and meet them
most every evening in company ; and the
way in which this aged party comes up
to the scratch and cuts out the youthful
parties and fills their hearts with envy is
absolutely a caution.'

" Pete Doyle was one of Walt's dearest
friends — perhaps his dearest ; and Walt's

»47

Days with Walt Whitman

letters to Pete are veritable love-letters.

The story of their meeting, as given by

Pete in his ' interview ' is quite romantic :

4 It is a curious story. We felt to each

other at once. I was a conductor (on a

tram). The night was very stormy — he

had been over to see Burroughs before he

came down to take the car — the storm

was awful. Walt had his blanket — it

was thrown round his shoulders — he

seemed like an old sea-captain. He was

the only passenger, it was a lonely night,

so I thought I would go in and talk with

him. Something in me made me do it,

and something in him drew me that way.

He used to say there was something in me

had the same effect on him. Anyway I

went into the car. We were familiar at

once — I put my hand on his knee — we

understood. He did not get out at the

end of the trip — in fact went all the way

back with me. I think the year of this

148

Walt Whitman's Children

was 1866. From that time on we were
the biggest sort of friends.'

" Their intimacy, as shown by the cor-
respondence, lasted on undiminished for
over ten years. Through the letters peep
in and out the forms and names of other
friends, mostly young fellows, tram-con-
ductors, fire-engine men, &c, to whom
Walt sends his love and messages. His
devotion to his friends of this kind, the
'bus-drivers in early days in New York,
the ferry-men, the soldiers in the war, and
others, is of course well known ; and it
appears to have been in many cases
ardently returned. ' Many a soldier's kiss
dwells on these bearded lips.' In fact, in
his poems we find his expressions of love
towards men and towards women put
practically on an equality — if anything
indeed the references to the former are the
more frequent and the more passionate.

In actual life, too, during that later period

149

Days with Walt Whitman

after the war, there can be no doubt that

his intimacies with men were much more

numerous and close than with women.

We have no record, I think, during that

time, of any very close intimacy with a

woman, though of warm friendships with

women we have several instances.

" Summing up then all that has been

said, I gather that in his early years

Walt had some liaisons with the fair sex ;

certainly one such relation, which may have

lasted several years, and which may (see

the already quoted poem) have been

chiefly initiated and pressed from the

lady's side ; but that in his later period

(after the age of forty-five or so) —

whether from a change of temperament

or any other cause — these ceased to play

a part in his life ; at any rate there is

no indication of them. It is clear also

that throughout his life his intimacies

with men were very close and ardent ;

150

Walt Whitman's Children

and it seems possible that these, in the
later period, to some extent supplied the
deficiency on the other side.

" Walt's attitude in ' Leaves of Grass '
towards men or women is, as I have
already remarked, singularly uniform.
Both sexes seem to come equally within
the scope of his love. And there is a
passage in Pete Doyle's already quoted
interview which curiously corroborates
this. Pete probably never read ' Leaves
of Grass,' or took much account of it ;
but he gives the following from his own
observation : * Towards women generally
Walt had a good way — he very easily
attracted them. But he did that with
men, too. And it was an irresistible
attraction. I've had many tell me — men
and women. He had an easy gentle way
— the same for all, no matter who they
were, or what their sex.'

" Whether this large attitude towards

J5*

Days with Walt Whitman

sex, this embrace which seems to reach
equally to the male and the female, indi-
cates a higher development of humanity
than we are accustomed to — a type super-
virile, and so far above the ordinary man
and woman that it looks upon both with
equal eyes ; or whether it merely indicates
a personal peculiarity ; this and many
other questions collateral to the subject I
have not touched upon. It has not been
my object in making these remarks to
enter into any vague speculations, but
rather to limit myself to a few conclusions
which seemed clear and obvious and fairly
demonstrable."

152

Allen & Co. Sc

alxrwb tLe^ sii&(vr 1855 (JA-ae $2/

WHITMAN AND EMERSON

T^HE relations between Whitman and
* Emerson form an interesting sub-
ject. There is little doubt that the two
men had a deep mutual respect and
admiration for each other ; and however
any chance expression dropped at any
time, on either side, might seem to belie
this, I believe it lasted to the end. It is
quite likely that Whitman owed some-
thing in the inception of " Leaves of
Grass ,1 to Emerson's writings. This
does not mean of course that, without
Emerson, Whitman would have failed of
his work ; but, as so often happens in
such cases, when a mass of material is

153

Days with Walt Whitman

forming somewhat undefinedly, and seek-
ing outlet, the work of the predecessor
comes to give it a decisive touch, and
bring it to birth.

In his very interesting " Reminiscences
of Walt Whitman " (originally printed
in the Atlantic Monthly, February 1902 *),
John Townsend Trowbridge touches on
this subject ; and without endorsing his
remarks in every particular, it may be
interesting to quote them. Relating a
conversation he had with Whitman one
Sunday at Boston, in the spring of i860,
when Whitman had come over to Boston
to see his third edition through the press,
Trowbridge says : —

" I was extremely interested to know
how far the influence of our greatest
writer (Emerson) had been felt in the
making of a book which, without being

1 Now substantially reproduced in his book, " My
Own Story."

*54

Whitman and Emerson

at all imitative, was pitched in the very
highest key of self-reliance. In his letter
to Emerson, printed in the second edition
of ' Leaves of Grass/ speaking of ' Indi-
viduality, that new moral American con-
tinent,' Whitman had averred : ' Those
shores you found ; I say, you led the
States there — have led me there.' And
it seemed hardly possible that the first
determined attempt to cast into literature
a complete man, with all his pride and
passions, should have been made by one
whose feet were not already firmly planted
on- c those shores.' Then there was the
significant fact of his having mailed a
copy of his first edition to Emerson.

" Whitman talked frankly on the sub-
ject, that day on Prospect Hill, and told
how he became acquainted with Emer-
son's writings. He was at work as a
carpenter (his father's trade before him)
in Brooklyn, building with his own hands

*55

Days with Walt Whitman

and on his own account small and very
plain houses for laboring men ; as soon
as one was finished and sold, beginning
another, — houses of two or three rooms.
This was in 1854 ; he was then thirty-five
years old. He lived at home with his
mother; going off to his work in the
morning and returning at night, carrying
his dinner-pail like any common laborer.
Along with his pail he usually carried a
book, between which and his solitary meal
he would divide his nooning. Once the
book chanced to be a volume of Emer-
son ; and from that time he took with
him no other writer. His half-formed
purpose, his vague aspirations, all that
had lain smouldering so long within him,
waiting to be fired, rushed into flame at
the touch of those electric words, — the
words that burn in the prose - poem
' Nature,' and in the essays on ' Spiritual

Laws,' the 'Oversoul,' 'Self-reliance.' The

156

Whitman and Emerson

sturdy carpenter in his working-day garb,
seated on his pile of boards ; a poet in
that rude disguise, as yet but dimly con-
scious of his powers ; in one hand the
sandwich put up for him by his good
mother, his other hand holding open the
volume that revealed to him his greatness
and his destiny — this is the picture which
his simple narrative called up, that Sun-
day so long ago, and which has never
faded from my memory.

" He freely admitted that he could
never have written his poems if he had
not first ' come to himself,' and that
Emerson helped him to - find himself.'
I asked if he thought that he would
have come to himself without that help.
He said, ' Yes, but it would have taken
longer.' And he used this characteristic
expression : ' I was simmering, simmer-
ing, simmering ; Emerson brought me to
a boil.'

»S7

Days with Walt Whitman

"It was in that summer of 1854, while
he was still at work upon his houses, that
he began the ' Leaves of Grass/ which he
wrote, and rewrote, and re-rewrote (to
quote again his own words), and after-
wards set in type with his own hand.

" I make this statement thus explicit
because a question of profound personal
and literary interest is involved, and be-
cause it is claimed by some of the later
friends of Whitman that he wrote his
first ' Leaves of Grass ' before he had
read Emerson. When they urge his own
authority for their contention, I can only
reply that he told me distinctly the con-
trary, when his memory was fresher.

" The Emersonian influence is often

clearly traceable in Whitman's early

poems ; seldom in the later. It is in

the first line of the very first poem in

which he struck the keynote of his defiant

chant : ' I celebrate myself.' Yet the

158

Whitman and Emerson

form Whitman chose for his message
was as independent of Emerson's as of
all other literary forms whatsoever."

One of the " later friends " to whom
Trowbridge refers is no doubt John Bur-
roughs, who on page 16 of his " Walt
Whitman as Poet and Person " (New
York, 1867) says, speaking of the first
edition of " Leaves of Grass " : —

" I take occasion to say that Whitman,
up to the time he published the quarto
edition, here mentioned, had never read
the ' Essays ' or ' Poems ' of Mr. Emerson
at all. This is positively true. In the
summer following that publication, he
first became acquainted with the * Essays '
in this wise : He was frequently in the
habit of going down to the sea-shore at
Coney Island, and spending the day bath-
ing in the surf and rambling along the
shore, or lounging on the sand ; and on
one of these excursions he put a volume

159

Days with Walt Whitman

of Emerson into the little basket con-
taining his dinner and his towel. There,
for the first, he read 'Nature/ &c.
Soon, on similar excursions, the two
other volumes followed. Two years still
elapsed, however, and after his second
edition was issued, before he read Mr.
Emerson's poems."

It is interesting, in these two quo-
tations, to find the incident of the Emer-
son volume in the dinner-basket repeated,
yet placed by one writer in the year
1854, and by the other, equally decisively
in 1856! The matter is not extremely
important ; but it illustrates the extreme
and eternal difficulty of getting reliable
historical evidence. In this case there
are three memories, either of which may
be at fault, and one of which must be —
Whitman's, Trowbridge's, and Burroughs'.
Did Whitman, in forgetfulness, give to

Burroughs, sometime between '63 and

160

Whitman and Emerson

'67, a different account from what he
gave to Trowbridge in '6o ? or did either
Burroughs or Trowbridge only imper-
fectly remember the account he heard ?
It is difficult to say. Whitman in his
quite late years seems to have adopted
the Burroughs views ; but Whitman's
memory in his later years became very
unreliable. In his " Backward Glance o'er
Travel'd Roads" (published in 1888) he
says, speaking of the importance of the
Secession War in his own life and thought,
that " Without those three or four years
and the experiences they gave, ' Leaves
of Grass ' would not now be existing " ;
and that although he had " made a start
before," the beginnings of " Leaves of
Grass " might — except for this — have
come to naught, " almost positively would
have come to naught." This, considering
that far the larger and more important
part of " Leaves of Grass " was already

161 L

Days with Walt Whitman

printed and published in the i860 edition,
a year or more before the war broke out,
is rather disconcerting ; and suggests that
his memory may have been equally at
fault with regard to Emerson's part in
" Leaves of Grass," as it was with regard
to the part played by the war.

I say the matter is not very important ;
because it is obvious that whatever part
Emerson's teaching played it was only
a small part and of brief duration. It
may very possibly only have come in
after a start of some kind had already
been made on " Leaves of Grass" (see
letter quoted, infra, p. 186); it certainly
had nothing to do with the long " fore-
ground" of Whitman's early life on farms,
in cities, and by the sea-shore, where the
book was really prepared ; nor anything to
do with the special developments of the
poems, as in Children of Adam, or their
literary style — things which Emerson

i6z

Whitman and Emerson

distinctly disapproved of. At the same
time it seems to me quite likely that
at some moment the magnificent intel-
lectual intuitive outlook of Emerson,
as of an eagle in high-soaring vision of
seas and continents, sweeping the whole
world into the compass of his thought,
did give to Whitman just what he might
have been waiting for (though probably
in any case it would have come to him
some time), the magic touch and inspira-
tion which set his kosmos in order. No
doubt an outside push of some kind is
often required for the launching of a
big ship. On the whole the evidence
brought forward by Trowbridge seems
to me to favour his case — the fact of
Whitman's sending a copy of his first
edition to Emerson (showing that he
already thought something of Emerson's
opinion), his printed letter to Emerson

in the second edition, " those shores

163

Days with Walt Whitman

you found . . . have led me there," his
addressing Emerson as " Master " in the
same letter, and so on. In the " Notes
left over" of " Specimen Days" (p. 321)
Whitman himself says : " The remi-
niscence that years ago I began like most
youngsters to have a touch (though it
came late, and was only on the surface)
of Emerson on the brain — that I read
his writings, and addressed him in print
as ■ Master,' and for a month or so
thought of him as such — I retain not
only with composure, but positive satis-
faction. I have noticed that most young
people of eager minds pass through this
stage of exercise."

With regard to Emerson's opinion about
the new poems at this period, it is clear
from his letter of July 21, 1855, to Whit-
man : " Dear Sir, — I am not blind to the
worth of the wonderful gift of ' Leaves of

Grass.' I find it the most extraordinary

164

Whitman and Emerson

piece of wit and wisdom that America
has yet contributed," &c, — it is very
clear, I say, that Emerson was greatly
impressed, and indeed delighted, with the
volume. With his clear and piercing vision
he seems to have at once (or in a wonder-
fully brief time) reached through the odd
rough husk to the sweet and precious
kernel of the book ; and for this as well
as for his hearty expressions of appre-
ciation the world must ever be grateful
to him. Nevertheless the book, as was
inevitable, roused in him queer doubts
and heart-searchings. Either in 1855 or
in the early part of 1856 Emerson called
twice upon Whitman ; and though in
these visits the foundation of a personal
friendship was laid, it is clear that they
revealed also great gulfs of difference.
Emerson could not quite stomach Walt
Whitman, the rough, with his invas-

ively democratic ways, nor see anything

165

Days with Walt Whitman

particularly interesting in his working-folk
chums and pals ; while Whitman, on the
other hand, found his visitor too literary
and intellectual. On the occasion of my
own visit to the States in 1877, I stayed a
night at Emerson's house at Concord —
most pleasantly and hospitably received
— and enjoyed greatly his talk as we
walked up and down the old-fashioned
garden, or sat in his book-lined study.
When I spoke of Whitman, and asked
what he thought of him, he laughed
(a little nervously, I thought) and said,
"Well, I thought he had some merit at
one time : there was a good deal of
promise in his first edition — but he is a
wayward, fanciful man.1 I saw him in
New York, and asked him to dine at my

1 I am here simply transcribing notes made a few
days after the interview. He used a third epithet
beside wayward and fanciful, something like " violent,"
but I hardly think it was so strong as that. (See
supra, p. 48.)

166

Whitman and Emerson

hotel. He shouted for a ' tin mug ' for
his beer. Then he had a noisy fire-engine
society. And he took me there, and was
like a boy over it, as if there had never
been such a thing before ! " He went on,
in words which I do not recall, to object
to the absence of metre in " Leaves of
Grass"; and ended, I remember, by
taking down a volume of Tennyson from
the shelf — handling it affectionately and
showing me the author's autograph on the
fly-leaf — and dwelling on the beauty of
the Tennysonian diction and metre.1

1 I may as well here transcribe my further notes
of Emerson's personal appearance at the time, as
follows : " Emerson's failure of memory for names
is quite painful [his age was then 74], and there is
the fixed look of age in his eye, yet he is active in
body and full of fun and enjoyment of intellectual
life. His eyes are greyish blue, the corners of his
lips are often drawn upward, and there is a wonderful
bird-like look about the face, enhanced by his way
of jerking his head forward as he speaks. His eyes
sometimes look very straight and intense : and then
comes a moonlight smile over the face, very charm-
ing. His domestic life seems admirable."

167

Days with Walt Whitman

These few words about Whitman,
spoken by Emerson to a casual visitor,
must of course not be given too much
weight, or supposed to represent his total
and final estimate. But I insert them
here, as they probably represent pretty
fairly certain points of difference and
even disagreement which he discovered on
personal acquaintance. On further read-
ing, too, doubtless Emerson felt that he
could not corroborate or justify a great
deal of the matter, as well as the metre,
of " Leaves of Grass. " He was probably
swayed to and fro by various currents of
feeling with regard to it, and could not
settle clearly in his mind what he did
think. This is illustrated by a letter he
wrote to Thomas Carlyle in 1856, to
accompany a copy of the book, which he
was sending : —

" One book, last summer, came out in
New York, a nondescript monster, which

168

Whitman and Emerson

9

yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength,

and was indisputably American — which

I thought to send you ; but the book

throve so badly with the few to whom I

showed it, and wanted good morals so

much, that I never did. Yet I believe

now again, I shall. It is called ' Leaves

of Grass,' — was written and printed by a

journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New

York, named Walter Whitman ; and

after you have looked into it, if you

think, as you may, that it is only an

auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse,

you can light your pipe with it."

It could only have been a few weeks

after the above letter had been written to

Carlyle about the first " Leaves of Grass,"

that — quite unexpectedly to Emerson —

a second edition of the book appeared,

with Emerson's complete letter of 21st

July 1855, printed in an Appendix, and

an extract from the same letter, " I greet

169

Days with Walt Whitman

you at the beginning of a great career," in
gold upon the cover ! Besides this, there
was a long reply-letter from Whitman
to Emerson, addressing the latter as
" Master," and containing the above-
quoted passages about " those shores you
found," &c.

Whitman has been often blamed for
this quite unauthorised use of Emerson's
letter — and certainly according to our
Cis-Atlantic literary codes it was a cool
thing to do : very cool — considering of
course that in this second edition were
many pieces that Emerson had never even
seen ! But though the act may be diffi-
cult to defend, it must be remembered
that public opinion and practice on the
other side of the water was and is de-
cidedly more lax and easy-going in such
matters than on this side. Whitman
probably failed to realise (it was hardly

his nature to do so), the reaction this

170

Whitman and Emerson

advertisement might have upon Emerson
and his interests. He was thinking of
his own bantling first edition, flouted,
scorned, neglected, and like to perish^ and
of the splendid testimony from one of
the greatest of living names in letters,
which would suddenly lift it into fields
of life and light. " I supposed the letter
was meant to be blazoned/' — he said one
day to Trowbridge — " I regarded it as
the chart of an emperor." It did not
occur to him that its blazoning might
possibly cost the emperor his throne !

But indeed the matter was serious,
comically serious. Here was Emerson,
the imperial one, whose finger laid on a
book was like a lighthouse beam to all
the coteries of Boston, actually recom-
mending some new poems to the whole
world in terms of unstinted praise. The
whole world, of course, went to buy

them. A hundred parlors of mildly

171

Days with Walt Whitman

literary folk or primly polite Unitarian
and Congregational circles beheld scenes
over which kind history has drawn a veil !
— the good husband or head of the
house, after tea or supper, settling down
in his chair, " Now for the new book, so
warmly spoken of ! " The ladies taking
their knitting and sewing, their dresses
rustling slightly as they arrange them-
selves to listen, the general atmosphere
of propriety and selectness ; and then the
reading ! Oh, the reading ! The odd
words, the unusual phrases, the jumbled
sequences, the stumbling uncertainty of
the reader, the wonderment on the faces
of the listeners, and finally — confusion
and the pit ! the book closed, and hasty
flight and dispersion of the meeting.
Then, later, timid glances again at the
dreadful volume, only to find, amid
quagmires and swamps, the reptilian

author addressing the beloved Emerson

172

Whitman and Emerson

as " Master," and saying, " these shores
you found ! " Was it a nightmare ? Had
the emperor gone mad ? or was his printed
letter merely a fraud and a forgery ?

One can imagine the annoyance all
this caused to Emerson himself — the
deluge of letters and inquiries, the whirl-
pools of controversy among his myriad
followers, the would-be champions who
gaged their word and everlasting destiny
on his entire innocence, &c. Truly the
throne rocked for a season. But it was
too well based to be upset. Indeed I
cannot but think that Emerson, with his
sterling good sense and mental solidity,
rather enjoyed it all at bottom — the
uproar, the searchings of heart, and the
confusion of his congregations and coteries
(whose narrowness and provincialism were
often a trial to him). In his heart of
hearts — though doubtless he thought
Whitman had played him unfair, and

*73

Days with Walt Whitman

though certainly he did not think
Whitman's manner of speech on sexual
questions either wise or gracious — still
I believe he must have recognised and
did at that time recognise that the
book, " Leaves of Grass, " was a tremen-
dous gain to the world, and that it was
even going to do pioneer work for him,
Emerson, along his own line.

I think I am right in saying that there
was no public retaliation by Emerson
against the author of the offending book.
I have, at any rate, not heard of any.
There was, however, considerable public
stir against it. It was savagely criticised,
and " so extreme was the feeling excited
by it, that some good people in New
York seriously contemplated having the
author indicted and tried for publishing
on obscene book." * The publishers,
Fowler & Wells, fearing injury to their

1 See Bucke's "Walt Whitman," p. 141.
*74

Whitman and Emerson

business, threw the book up ; and so after
a brief career its publication ceased, and
for the next four years it remained as a
thing dead.

It was in i860 that Emerson and
Whitman met again. Whitman had come
to Boston to superintend the printing of a
third edition, to be issued by Thayer and
Eldridge. Heroic, calm, and undaunted,
unresentful even of neglect, he simply
went on his way. If the first and second
editions of " Leaves of Grass " had aroused
opposition, the third was still more likely
to do so. It gathered together many of
the most offending poems, with new ones
of the same character, in two groups,
Children of Adam, and Calamus, which
were certain to attract attention. It
was bold indeed of Thayer and Eldridge
to undertake the publication. Whether
by any chance one of the firm may
have persuaded Emerson to intervene

>75

Days with Walt Whitman

with the author, in favour of a general
toning down of the book, I know not.
But it is certain that Emerson came
to see him, and taking him out onto
Boston Common, walked with him for
two hours discussing this very subject.
Of that memorable conversation Whit-
man must speak for himself. In " Speci-
men Days," p. 191, under date 10-13
Oct. 1 88 1, he says: "Up and down this
breadth by Beacon Street, between these
same old elms, I walked for two hours, of
a bright sharp February midday twenty-
one years ago, with Emerson, then in
his prime, keen, physically and morally
magnetic, arm'd at every point, and when
he chose wielding the emotional just as
well as the intellectual. During those
two hours he was the talker and I the
listener. It was an argument, statement,
reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing

home (like an army corps in order,

176

Whitman and Emerson

artillery, cavalry, infantry), of all that
could be said against that part (and a
main part) in the construction of my
poems, Children of Adam. More precious
than gold to me that dissertation. It
afforded me, ever after, this strange and
paradoxical lesson ; each point of Emer-
son's statement was unanswerable, no
judge's charge ever more complete or
convincing, I could never hear the points
better put — and then I felt down in my
soul the clear and unmistakable conviction
to disobey all, and pursue my own way.
1 What have you to say then to such
things ? ' said Emerson, pausing in con-
clusion. ' Only that while I can't answer
them at all, I feel more settled than ever
to adhere to my own theory, and exemplify
it,' was my candid response. Whereupon
we went and had a good dinner at the
American House. And thenceforward
I never wavered or was touched with

177 M

Days with Walt Whitman

qualms (as I confess I had been two or
three times before)."

Very fine, is this scene between the two
men. Emerson bearing no grudge against
the buffalo poet, candidly doing his best to
give " Leaves of Grass" its proper scope,
and save it (as he thought) from its own
indiscretions — Whitman, loyal to himself
and to Emerson, equally candidly refusing
to budge. A hearty dinner afterwards,
and separation with mutual respect.1

It is probable that for the next twenty
years the two friends did not see each
other. I find no evidence of their meet-
ing. The war broke out ; Whitman went

1 In a letter to W. D. O'Connor (see New York
Tribune, 18th June 1882) Whitman wrote, "What
made and ever makes the argument of Emerson in
that walk on the Common dear and holy to me was
its personal affectionateness, as of an elder brother to
a younger. It was a vehement and even passionate
well-wishing, which I felt then, and feel to this hour,
the gratitude and reverence of my life could never
repay." (W. S. Kennedy's " Reminiscences of Walt
Whitman," p. 77.)

178

Whitman and Emerson

south and remained at Washington, and
afterwards at Camden, New Jersey, with
only occasional and brief visits to New
York. There was not much chance or
likelihood of their meeting. Nevertheless
their communications were not broken,
and the elder man had not ceased to be
interested in the younger ; for we find,
according to Trowbridge, that in Novem-
ber 1863, Whitman (who was then look-
ing about for some official work or post
at Washington) had by him two letters
of recommendation written by Emerson —
the one to Senator Sumner, and the other
to Secretary Chase. Of what other cor-
respondence or meetings there may have
been between them for the next twenty
years, we do not hear much.1 Emerson's

1 Emerson seems to have helped Whitman in the
matter of hospital funds ; and the two appear to have
just seen each other at the re-burial of Poe at Balti-
more in 1875. (See Binns' "Life of Whitman," pp.
198 and 258.)

179

Days with Walt Whitman

respect for " Leaves of Grass " as a feasible
contribution to literature seems to have
waned. He respected of course much of
the matter of it, but could not stomach
the manner. He told his friend Sanborn
once that the book read like " a mixture
of the Bhagvat-Gita and the New Tork
Herald" x He included no specimen of
it in his collection " Parnassus " (1874);
and detested its metre or want of metre.2
[Whitman says somewhere — " Specimen
Days," p. 321 — "I see he covertly or
plainly likes best superb verbal polish,
or something old or odd — Waller's ' Go,
lovely rose/ or Lovelace's lines ' To
Lucasta ' — and the like."] Yet for the
Man, as well as I think for his Message
in its real essence, Emerson had a great
and enduring respect.

1 " Reminiscences of Walt Whitman," by W. S.
Kennedy (1896), p. 78.

2 Nevertheless Emerson himself at an earlier age
had made experiments in the same direction.

180

Whitman and Emerson

In 1 88 1 Walt came once more to
Boston to superintend a new edition of
his poems. Since i860 much had hap-
pened. The first two editions (1855 and
1856) had been scouted by the public
and hastily dropped by the publishers ; the
i860 edition fell almost dead through the
War. Walt Whitman went to Washing-
ton. It was not till 1867 that he printed
a fourth edition (New York), including
" Drum Taps." The fifth came in 1871
(Washington). The sixth in 1876 (cen-
tennial and authors edition, Camden) in
two volumes, including prose. And the
seventh is the one of which we are
speaking (Osgood & Co. Boston, 1 8 8 1 -2 ).
Hardly was the book out, and selling
well, when the Society for the Suppression
of Vice in Boston pounced. The Attor-
ney-general for Massachusetts, through
the District Attorney, served a notice on

Osgoods (early in '82). Osgoods appealed

181

Days with Walt Whitman

to Whitman to withdraw some of the
poems. Whitman absolutely refused ;
and once more the publishers threw the
book up and left the edition on his
hands !

But to return to our subject. Emerson
of course was not ignorant of the stir that
was being made. Indeed there can be
little doubt that both by his own family
and from outside he was urged to dis-
sociate himself from the book and its
author. But he was not going to do
anything of the kind.1 In September
1 88 1, Whitman came over from Boston
(from his proof-reading) to stay a night
with Sanborn at Concord. Emerson (now
quite an old man, seventy-eight) and

1 " The true fact is, R. W. Emerson had a firm and
deep attachment to Whitman from first to last, as
person and poet, which Emerson's family and several
of his conventional literary friends tried their best in
vain to dislodge." (See W. S. Kennedy's " Reminis-
cences of Walt Whitman," p. 77.)

18*

Whitman and Emerson

other friends came in for the evening —
" a long and blessed evening " Walt
calls it (" Specimen Days," p. 189).
He describes in fact how, without being
rude, he was able to take a good look
at Emerson most of the time, and speaks
of " the well-known expression of sweet-
ness in his face, and the old clear-peering
aspect quite the same." Then the next
day, Sunday, the Emersons asked him
to dinner. " Several hours at Emerson's
house, and dinner there. An old familiar
house (he has been in it thirty-five years),
with surroundings, furnishments, roomi-
ness, and plain elegance and fulness, signi-
fying democratic ease, sufficient opulence,
and an admirable old-fashioned simplicity :
modern luxury, with its mere sumptuous-
ness and affectation, either touched lightly
upon or ignored altogether. Dinner the
same. Of course the best of the occasion

183

Days with Walt Whitman

(Sunday, Sept. 18, '81) was the sight of
Emerson himself. "

This dinner and hearty reception by
Emerson Whitman looked back upon
with something like pride, as a " victor-
event" in his life. (See letter of 1887
to W. S. Kennedy, p. 76 of his book.)
The next year, May 6, 1882, he stood by
Emerson's grave. " How shall I hence-
forth dwell on the blessed hours when,
not long since, I saw that benignant face,
the clear eyes, the silently smiling mouth,
the form yet upright in its great age — to
the very last, with so much spring and
cheeriness, and such an absence of de-
crepitude that even the term venerable
hardly seemed fitting. . . . We can say,
as Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, It
is not we who come to consecrate the
dead — we reverently come to receive,

if so it may be, some consecration to

184

Whitman and Emerson

ourselves and daily work from him."
(" Specimen Days," p. 197.)

With these words we may leave the
personal relation between the two men.
The nobility of them both, the grandeur,
sincerity, and simplicity of their relation,
the hearty accord, affection, and admira-
tion, beneath grave and acknowledged
differences of habit and opinion — all
make up a picture of deep and lasting
significance, and one which future ages
can hardly fail to cherish. On the purely
literary side, however, it was perhaps
only natural that, as time went on, they
should distinctly drift apart. Emerson
was less and less able to adapt himself
to Whitman's strange new departures.
Whitman more and more avowedly sepa-
rated his respect for the man from his
respect for the writer. In latest years

he seemed almost anxious that he should

185

Days with Walt Whitman

not be thought to have learnt anything
from Emerson's books. In the letter
already alluded to, of 1887, to W. S.
Kennedy, he says : " It is of no import-
ance whether I had read Emerson before
starting ' Leaves of Grass ' or not. The
fact happens to be positively that I had
not;"1 and later in the same letter:
" If I were to unbosom to you in the
matter I should say that I never cared
so very much for Emerson's writings,
prose or poems, but from his first
personal visit and two hours with me
... I had a strange attachment and
love for him and his contact, talk,
company, magnetism." In Whitman's
"Specimen Days," also (pp. 321-2)
he has some keen criticisms of the

1 This letter is odd and jumbley and a little con-
fusing in style, and I must say (considering also its
date) does not carry entire conviction to me.

186

Whitman and Emerson

" bloodless intellectuality " and other
defects of Emerson's style — criticisms
which, though decidedly good on the
whole, seem to me needlessly stringent,
and even a bit captious in parts.

THE END

Printed by Ballantynk, Hanson 6° Co.
Edinburgh &> London

zAlso by EDWARD CARPENTER

The Art of Creation

Essays on the Self and its Powers

Crown 8vo, Cloth, gilt top, 266 pp. 5s. net.

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1

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70